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PHP projects join forces to Go PHP 5

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:43:39 +0000

5 July 2007 — A consortium of PHP developers has announced today that several leading Open Source PHP projects will be dropping support for older versions of PHP in upcoming releases of their software as of February 5, 2008 as part of a joint effort to move the PHP developer community fully onto PHP version 5. The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the effort.

Drupal VS. Mambo 1

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 16:43:14 +0000

Originally written for Xaneon Development by Arto Bendiken

Now, when making any comparison such as this, the first thing to realize is that it’s unlikely that one tool will fit every need and purpose. To an extent, comparing Mambo and Drupal is comparing apples to oranges. They are two very different systems, with widely differing goals and intended audiences. They just both happen to fit under the convenient heading of “content management systems”, meaning you can create decent websites with either one of them.

Also, the people on our team probably don’t represent the broad cross-section of Mambo users out there; our needs don’t necessarily fit their needs. We are. for the most part, people with strong technical backgrounds. Some of our reasons for abandoning Mambo may not resonate at all with the “average user”, if there is such a person. Unless you are a programmer, or have an equally deep technical understanding, take everything we say with a grain of salt.

Drupal VS. Mambo 2

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:03:23 +0000

General Comparison

Mambo has, for a long time, been ahead of competing CMS projects with regards to marketing. Mambo’s public image is pretty, appealing and very marketable to management. Mambo has no doubt benefited from the sponsoring company and trademark owner Miro’s advertising dollars in this regard.

Of course, this was all before the recent hostile project takeover by Miro; while there are people who will argue that any publicity is good publicity, we’ll just have to sit and see how this particular move will play out.

Drupal, in contrast, has been a community project from the start. There’s been no single strong corporate sponsor (though that’s changing with entities such as CivicSpace throwing their weight behind the project) to hold sway over the project, and the overall image has been somewhat less glitzy and more downplayed.

Drupal VS. Mambo 5

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:56:48 +0000

Search Engine Friendly URLs

This is a subject that has become intimately familiar to us. One of our earliest requirements for a CMS was adequate support for free-form, human-readable URLs. At the time we started to use Mambo, there really wasn’t any solution to this aside from some hacks shared in the Mambo forum, and a commercial SEF add-on for Mambo developed by one of the core developers.

To solve the problem, we wrote Xaneon Alias Manager 1.0, which allowed us to define friendly URLs manually for all of Mambo’s content pages. While it worked quite well, and hundreds of websites are still using XAM today, it was a labor-intensive solution for larger sites. Eventually, out of dissatisfaction with having to maintain the friendly URLs manually grew Xaneon Extensions 2.0 (XE2) for Mambo, which introduced automated friendly URLs for both content items and component-generated paths.

Drupal VS. Mambo 3

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:55:48 +0000

Technical & Architectural Differences

Now we come to the real meat of the matter. During our sojourn into the dark art known as Mambo SEF, we’ve necessarily become quite familiar with the internal workings of Mambo. To be candidly honest, it’s not exactly impressive.

Mambo is a very limiting design. Pretty much the only “hook” into Mambo’s core, to allow any significant third-party extension to Mambo’s base functionality without modifying the core files, is the SEF support. (A cynical person might argue that even this “hook” exists only for the benefit of a certain commercial SEF extension developed by a former core developer.)

Drupal VS. Mambo 7

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:30:48 +0000

Other Considerations

Let’s just say the list of goodies Drupal delivers us is pretty long. We haven’t even discussed Drupal’s templating system (keywords: XHTML, CSS, total customizability, and optionally, Smarty) or the unlimited content hierarchies you can create with the built-in Drupal module called, appropriately enough, “taxonomy”.

Drupal VS. Mambo 4

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:28:46 +0000

Nowhere are the above-mentioned design considerations more visible than in two add-on features we consider absolutely essential for both Mambo and Drupal: internationalization (i18n) and search engine friendly (SEF) URL addresses. Both require fairly low-level “hooks” into core functionality to function.
Internationalization

There is i18n support available in both systems, but in both Mambo and Drupal some patches are required to the core; this in our opinion is inexcusable, in both cases. Only unilingual users and websites would not need i18n, and those kind of websites are a luxury on the European side of the Big Pond, at least.

However, compare the patching required, and how the add-on is implemented in each case: that is, in Mambelfish versus Drupal’s i18n module. In such a comparison, Drupal’s clean design shines through very favorably: the i18n module is much less of a “dirty hack” than what’s required for Mambo, and builds upon the superb localization feature of Drupal. In fact, Drupal’s i18n patch is only about two dozen one-line code additions, and would be trivial to integrate into the Drupal core in a future release, should Drupal’s project leadership decide to do so.

Xaneon News Archive

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:27:58 +0000

Page coming...

News - Alias

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:26:18 +0000

Setting up the site...

Search News

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:25:09 +0000

Setting up....

Xaneon products and components

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:23:57 +0000

Just setting up Xaneon products and components pages... stay tuned...

SEO products and management

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:22:29 +0000

Setting up the site.... "seo management" -articles just coming...

Guides

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:21:12 +0000

Setting up site, please come back later...

Guestbook

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:19:39 +0000

Coming soon...

About us

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:18:49 +0000

Stay tuned, coming soon...