Bringing ideas to fruition

Establishing stability

The Mambo Core Development Team is almost entirely new to the Mambo code and as a result, brings fresh eyes with new views on the state of the project. The released code is feature rich, but the new team feels a need to review a number of the core mechanisms in order to make them robust enough for further long term development. The code that was under development at the time of the fork was incomplete and not fully tested, so without the knowledge that departed with its developers, is considered to be of limited value.

In this situation, the core team's first priority is to deal with the recorded bugs in 4.5.2.3 in order of significance and to tackle all known security weaknesses. The factors that cause these problems are generally well known and it is essential that the security issues be addressed quickly and effectively.

Historically releases of Mambo tended to involve a very high proportion of the total code and sometimes came with disruptive frequency. Goals for future stability include: efforts to implement development and release control procedures that will reduce the frequency of bugs and remedial releases; and, progressive design, with particular emphasis on encapsulation inside sound and documented interfaces.

While bugs are being fixed and security loopholes eliminated, improvements are being made, mostly in small ways, and the team is gaining familiarity with the code.

On minor housekeeping issues:

• The core development team has agreed to use only a standard three digit release numbering system, with the first release to be 4.5.3.
  
• There will also be efforts to resist feature creep through practices such as last minute addition of functionality. In the case of 4.5.3 no new features are being added apart from the previous work on a simplified user interface, demonstrated in the 4.5.3 beta.
  
• However hard we try, some bugs are inevitable. Provided these are non-critical, the team will make regular bug fix releases that can be implemented by Mambo site administrators without particular urgency.
  
• Notification procedures are also being implemented for key partners and third party developers in an effort to improve communication and transparency.

Current Mambo Development Projects

Dates are given for guidance only. Reasonable efforts will be made to keep to them, but in the nature of a complex project that relies on volunteer workers, none can be guaranteed.

• Internationalization is strongly demanded and is considered to be a top priority. Work is currently in progress to decide on the best technical solution. It is expected that decisions will be made on the approach to be adopted by mid November 2005, at which time development will commence. Once standards have been established for data formats, work on translation can commence. This should be under way from the beginning of December 2005.
  
• The second priority project is to establish a viable Role Based Access Control system throughout Mambo. The ACL facility presently in Mambo 4.5.2.3 is considered excessively large and complex and is being replaced by a lightweight, flexible system designed in the light of recent thinking on OO RBAC mechanisms. It will provide comprehensive access mechanisms that can be used both within Mambo and by third party developers for their solutions.
  
• Priority is also being given to work on templates, although this is presently at an early stage. However, the goal is to provide a highly flexible facility that will combine two important factors. One is to make some reduction in the freedom of templates so as to reduce the likelihood of security issues through template installation. The other is to retain the ease and flexibility of template development that has been one of the critical factors in Mambo's success.

Mambo Development Goals

Much of Mambo consists of plugins

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