Mambo Split

Here’s an interesting bit of news. It has a certain ring of familiarity to it

http://www.opensourcematters.org/

Yea no kidding myself and a few others forked postnuke and started envolution. I was lead dev and head programmer. Then another guy forked from us. Meanwhile john cox the lead dev for postnuke and the whole dev team took so much flack over lying about the theme engine they chose form the community that they left postnuke and left a handfull of guys left really only like one or two guys were left.

The funny thing is that after the envo team kind of got busy with real life I left it from shear burn out nad went back to postnuke and i and larry master bolted the theme engine onto posntuke( the whole theme engine issue is why we forked to begin with and why john cox and most he other devs left). That left postnuke with the theme engine they never wanted before and though a few other issues most of the left over devs from postnuke left and that left about 5 of us running postnuke. Myself, Larry Masters, Mark West, Andreas, Drak, And Vanessa. Drak runs hostnuke and Vanessa although not a dev is kind of like project mamanger and pr person.

Sorry for going on but when i read the whole mambo thing this is what it reminded me of. Of did I mention part of the reason John Cox and others left is because they were trying to make a (foundation to protect the interests of postnuke) Most of us smelled a rat. As for the project John and the other devs started? It’s called xaraya and has been an almost complete failure. The only people i really see running it is the devs who program for it. It’s performance is really bad. They even did a theme contest about a year ago now and only got one entry form John himself. It’s truly sad. I wonder is this is the fate of the miro owned mambo.

Hm. My hosting company has banned all the ’nuke derivatives due to constant security issues. That’s one reason why I took up with Etomite, needing a way to do multilanguage, and Mambo, Xoops etc just aren’t suitable for that. I once had a pretty serious community site for my local town running on phpnuke; the code was a bit on the crufty side.

Yea, I did quite a bit of work with PostNuke back in the day, too. It’s sad to see the CMS world so divided. I really hope that the open source community will come together to focus it’s resources on a few key CMSes tailored to specific purposes and let the myriad of fork clones just fade into internet history. I’m glad that MODx isn’t just becoming another Etomtie but that we’re really reworking everything from the ground up. I think that’s what it takes to succeed in the long run, technology doesn’t stand still and neither can we.

Quote from: sottwell at Aug 18, 2005, 05:32 PM

Hm.  My hosting company has banned all the ’nuke derivatives due to constant security issues.  That’s one reason why I took up with Etomite, needing a way to do multilanguage, and Mambo, Xoops etc just aren’t suitable for that.  I once had a pretty serious community site for my local town running on phpnuke; the code was a bit on the crufty side.

Yes back then I knew better than to use phpnulke the nice thing about postnuke is that it really does not have most of the cruft that makes phpnuke really bad. It’s most a compelete recode with very little the same. It’s also modular and very usable. And myself and andreas were very good at the security side of the house so there were few security issues and when reported we fixed them fast. Mark west is good also. The current dev team is much larger and things are really picking up steam again. But I’m just not interested anymore really. I’ve been waiting for about two years since larry and I added the theming engine to it and they still have not released the latest version So i got tired of waiting and found other things.

The Mambo split has some interesting implications for ModX. The Mambo split is a result of Mambo’s success.  Mambo has started to move further up the chain to a point where its seen as a viable tool for corporate web development, and it was perceived by all, including the core developers [who have now forked], that a foundation would assist in project management, funding overhead, and funding development time.

It seems from reading the discussions at http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=56587 -[ 28 pages so I only got 1/2 way thru] that the community/developer concerns were that Miro was trying to hijack control of the project.  In particular although Miro was saying the Foundation Board would be elected by the members, the first Board was appointed by the Miro CEO, and announced without community consultation.

I hope ModX will one day be as successful as Mambo.  Maybe we should start thinking about how we will handle success earlier rather than later.  A good open source system needs community, but overtime it needs to develop a a management framework and a succession plan.  Core developers move on (or need to get paid for increased commitments), new developers get involved.

I know we started this discussion right after the fork from Etomite, and maybe we don’t need to re-open it right now.  But after we reach ModX v1.0, I think we should develop a community roadmap for handling success as soon as possible.

Regards

Richard

Quote from: webmedic at Aug 18, 2005, 05:44 PM

Yes back then I knew better than to use phpnulke the nice thing about postnuke is that it really does not have most of the cruft that makes phpnuke really bad. It’s most a compelete recode with very little the same. It’s also modular and very usable. And myself and andreas were very good at the security side of the house so there were few security issues and when reported we fixed them fast. Mark west is good also. The current dev team is much larger and things are really picking up steam again. But I’m just not interested anymore really. I’ve been waiting for about two years since larry and I added the theming engine to it and they still have not released the latest version So i got tired of waiting and found other things.

When leaving the crumbling enterprise portal startup world 3 or 4 years ago, I too found PostNuke while developing a plan to work as an opensource-focused freelance web developer. I later moved to an Italian fork called MD-Pro because of it’s choice of bundling AutoTheme for it’s theming engine, which at the time I thought was better than tacos (ooops, didn’t mean to bring that back up). But alas, these were impressive when they were first conceived and developed. Eto and now MODx are just simply incredible to me still.

Now I have a feeling my hosting provider will also have to ban these *Nuke-based sites very soon; my last two remaining PostNuke and MD-Pro sites were attacked just this past week. Sigh.

Finally, on the note of success, I think we have a great foundation team and a wonderful community here at MODx, and we’ll always warmly welcome everyone’s input into how we keep it free, for the people, and competitive in the CMS market ;-)

wow if you only knew. That md-pro was done by timax. He was the guy who forked evolution. and md-pro was the result. it sounds like you were on the outside I was on the inside. Yes I left out a bunch of other things that really don’t matter in the whole thing.

By the way there is a huge whole in xml-rpc get it uninstalled immediately it is even an issue with the php-pear classes. I’m still on the postnuke core dev mailing list and they have been trying to get a new release out for this. it’s not a postnuke issue but rather an xml-rpc issue. Every single app that runs on php and uses it will be having issues and need to dissable it immediately. I hope that helps out your sites from getting hacked.

As for what we have here yes I agree I think the community is great and the product is great and I’m so glad i never ever liked mambo to being with because I might have missed out on modx.

Here’s an article on Ars Technica about the whole Mambo fiasco:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050818-5223.html

Before finding MODx, I was darn close to developing sites using Mambo. Man...after spending hours upon hours trying to build a custom template, configure various plugins, and work out some of the annoyances, I finally gave up on the thing! The funny thing about Mambo is their catch phrase: "Power in simplicity". I find it ironic because in my opinion, it’s anything but simple. Powerful, yes...but not so simple! I think Jeffery Veen said it best: "What the hell is a Mambot?" Anyways...I didn’t reply here to dog on Mambo. Mambo is good for what it is...it’s just not my cup of tea.

However, I admire all the work the development team has put into Mambo and I’m sure over time Mambo will get better. I think it’s a shame the way Miro treated the developers and I sincerely hope that whatever endeaver’s the developers have will work out. And I agree...I sincerely hope that MODx will turn into something that is just as successful and popular as Mambo. And I hope that the success of MODx doesn’t turn into a fiasco like what happened to Mambo. Judging from what I know of all the MODx foundation members and development team, I doubt anything like this could happen. We all have too much pride for something like that to happen.

Hmm. Is a Mambo split/fork a fiasco?  Was the Modx-Etomite split a fiasco?  Certainly in the awkward way Modx was kicked out, and there’s the point that the open source world has its talent spread on far to many project.  But splits and forks also bring new ideas, and content management is far from a mature technology.  There are many more avenues to explore.  So it seems likely that if Modx continues to grow in popularity, one day differences will arise within this community that result in a fork.  I certainly hope that if and when that day comes the community is gracious enough to bless it and learn from it.

I hope ModX will one day be as successful as Mambo.  Maybe we should start thinking about how we will handle success earlier rather than later.  A good open source system needs community, but overtime it needs to develop a a management framework and a succession plan.  Core developers move on (or need to get paid for increased commitments), new developers get involved.

I know we started this discussion right after the fork from Etomite, and maybe we don’t need to re-open it right now.  But after we reach ModX v1.0, I think we should develop a community roadmap for handling success as soon as possible.

Roadmaps are a good idea.  Vision builds consensus.   I’ve thought for a long time that it would be great to have a set of community-building documents that detail the following:

1. Mission statement.  Lack of clear philosophy and goals seems to trip up some projects. 

2. Development roadmap.  The page on the site is a good start, but how about something with more detail?  Maybe even with a polling system to help with key choices and prioritizations?

3. Basic governing structure.  Process for making decisions.

These things would be helpful wouldn’t they?  I’m new at this sort of thing, but I don’t see them being that difficult either.