| We would also like to make a 2nd major announcement at this time and one that has long-term implications to the project itself. Anyone who has followed the MiaCMS, Mambo, and Joomla! projects over the last few years is all too familiar with forks. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to forking an open source project; Mambo has actually been forked quite a few times over the years with varying degrees of success. Most of these forks have either faded away or simply gone dormant. However, two very successful projects have emerged from the ashes of their parent and even greatly improved upon the codebase they started with; MiaCMS and Joomla!. We do not wish to rehash the reasons for the MiaCMS fork several years ago (for those interested you can find that information here). Today, we are pleased to announce a step in the opposite direction... an open source CMS project merger. The MiaCMS and Aliro projects are joining forces to create a best of breed/next generation CMS.
While we are just announcing this news today, the two teams have already been working together behind the scenes for about 6 months now. Conversations started around creating a compatibility layer for extensions, but soon evolved into plans for a merger since we are tackling the same problems and have very similar end goals. These teams have a history of collaboration. Martin Brampton, founder of Aliro, was a huge contributor and former Core Development Team Leader on the Mambo project several years ago. He wrote much of what became Mambo 4.6, which eventually became the basis for MiaCMS. At Mambo he worked closely with Chad Auld who went on to become Mambo's Project Leader and Core Development Team Leader after Martin's departure, and eventually a co-founder of MiaCMS. Several other current MiaCMS core developers were also on the Mambo team at that time; Neal Thompson and Richard Peter Ong. These folks together with Ozgur Cem Sen, another former Mambo Core Development Team Leader, have decided to reunite. The emerging Aliro platform will serve as the basis for this new era. Much of the work done in MiaCMS since its inception will become part of Aliro, e.g., the YUI implementation, the JavaScript architecture, the WYSIWG editors, a number of extensions, etc. We will be using the name Aliro for the combined project. MiaCMS will remain a standalone project that is fully supported with major bug fixes and security updates for the foreseeable future. The MiaCMS core developers will begin focusing all new development efforts on the Aliro platform after the MiaCMS 4.9 release is out and stable. We will keep you updated as we have news to report. Aliro itself is already a fairly stable product, and we encourage everyone to download the latest beta and take it for a spin. We still have a good bit of work to do before the first official production release, but we are well on our way.
Why was this change needed?
* MiaCMS was created as a fork of the Mambo project, the grandfather of all open source CMS projects. Mambo either serves as the basis for or as an inspiration to most of the CMS systems in use today.
* Mambo is quite old at this point. Releases, developers, and svn activity are all but non-existent, as alluded to in a recent interview with Chad Auld. MiaCMS has given new life to the aging platform, but with the advancements in PHP and related frameworks over the last several years, the system is really in need of a full re-architecture building upon the lessons learned over the last 8 years. While still with the Mambo project we announced such an effort several years ago, before the fork. That effort was to be a Mambo rewrite on top of the CakePHP framework, but it never really got off the ground due to the political infighting that ultimately required the MiaCMS fork.
* So, here we are several years later with a much better system, MiaCMS, but still in need of a much larger architectural shift. While we have advanced the upper layers of the system, Aliro has been focused on the all-important foundation. Building on top of Aliro will allow us to better serve the community and put out a CMS that is even more impressive, efficient, secure, and flexible than the one you currently enjoy.
We hope the community is as excited about this news as we are. We look forward to continued success with you at our side. Thank you!
The MiaCMS team |
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment