Miro supersizes 4.5.3!

What's with the wacky title on this post, you ask? Well there's shockin' news at the front, those scallywags at Miro have released the next version of Mambo and it's more than doubled in size, for no real gain.

With no doubt some irony, it's called 4.5.3 Beta, not that it's been thru a proper alpha phase at all, or it seems much testin' of this lame donkey of an "upgrade".

Well, I'm overstatin' the thing there, it aint even an upgrade. There's no way to move up from your current release to this new version, not that ya'll would want to anyway.

To be fair, a beta release aint sposed to be an upgrade, it's for testin' by people who feel like testin', not for live sites. In the announcement tho Miro has this to say "Click here to download and test drive", the poor unsuspectin' pilgrims would barely know what an unstable ride that could be...

So, let's take a tour of this stagecoach crash...

First thing I notice, there seems to be a few problems with the display of the copyright symbol in the installer. Must be some bad shaman magic goin' down there, karma if you're more inclined to smokin' tumbleweeds.

Then funnily enough in the default content, Mambo License, I find this juicy nugget:

2. Who owns the copyright to Mambo?
The copyright to Mambo is held by Miro International Pty Ltd. Miro were the original authors of Mambo and continue to actively support the project.

Now, if ya'll remember not so long ago the huge spin those varmits put into transferrin' their copyright to their "Foundation", for the good of all. Seems they've forgotten about that move already...

Into the backend and there's a few changes here from the old team's unreleased version. For a start, they included mosCE as the new editor. This seems to be the cause of this new version being more than twice the size, and if ya ask me that is pretty durn bloated for a content editor. Also a wee bit overcomplicated for most:

Looky at all those tabs, and that's just for the editor!

The odd thing, the really odd thing here folks, is that the developer of this extension to Mambo apparently doesn't support the Miro development at all. In fact on the front page of his site he declares full support for the core team's split and says that MosCE will not be supported for Miro's Mambo:

"So, how will this affect mosCE? Well, for starters, I fully support the actions of the developers. I believe it is the best course of action in the interests of Open Source, Mambo and free software. With that in mind, mosCE will no longer be available for the 'old' Mambo as of 1.0 Stable. There will however be a bugfix release some time next week to fix som eof the major reported problems, released as mosCE 1.0 RC3 for the mambot, and mosCE Admin 1.0 RC4 for the component.

From what I understand, the first release of this as yet unamed CMS will be fully compatible with all existing modeules, components and mambots.

As I don't have the time or the energy to support what may become to different CMS platforms, I have to pick one. On principle, I have decided to support the 'new' CMS."

It seems quite likely from this statement that this community developer has no association with his program being sucked into the new Miro 4.5.3.

Is this the kind of low-down action we should expect from the new Miro development process? Are they going to further take advantage of open source to simply turn Mambo into a hulking beast created from incorporating the hard work of others? Seems rightly so, pilgrims...

Oh yeah, I can hear some of you already gettin ready to rant on about the wonders of Open Source and how it's there for the takin', but hey, they could at least notify the guy they're adding his code to their CMS against his will.

Dirty no-good snakes...

So what else have we here? Well, there's a new way of havin' a look-see at your content now, which looks purty but would be a pain for larger sites, I expect. A "tree menu" that expands and shows you your sections and categories. The problem being if ya'll have hundreds of the little blighters your page is goin' to take some time to load...

Another new gadget is the Mambo Updater, that takes your ftp details and then updates straight to your site. Well, at this point, I don't rightly think I trust that lil devil...

So, I've had a long day on the frontier and maybe this here lowdown on the new Miro 4.5.3 is a bit low on actual content but hey, give an ol' cowboy a break. I'm sure ya'll could have a look-see and find all those bugs I been hearin' about. Surely this is one rushed job from the Miro camp...

Ya know what they said about the hare and the tortoise, the tortoise is slow and wins the race, and the hare is right tasty after it's been char-grilled. Yum.

There's a hoedown on the lowdown right over on the new OSM forums right now about this, plenty of good info bein' shared in those parts, if you wanna know more I recommend it highly.

Thankye kindly for readin',

The Lone Mamber