Torkil Johnsen

Production release of Mambo 4.6 is expected within this month, and Team Mambo has now announced a list of new improvements to be expected.

The increase in competition between Joomla and Mambo seems to be benefiting the end users at the moment. Both developer teams strive to deliver the best results for their community, and several new additions to the upcoming “separation”-releases (J!1.5 and M4.6) have been appearing. It’ll be exciting to follow this development after the separation of the two is final, to see if the developers slow down again.

From the recent newsflash at Mamboserver, I find a few very interesting new features indeed. These include a language manager for facilitating translation of the Mambo core, significant database performance improvements including a statement about getting better performance over “competing systems” (read: Joomla), and a brand new comments component for allowing comments to content items.

The new language manager is interesting because it hasn’t been done before, and because translation is important for a more wide spread acceptance of the system. This could help Mambo get a boost and a head start in countries that do not use English too much and are still without native translations of Joomla or Mambo.

The statement on better performance is interesting both because database performance has always been an issue with Mambo and Joomla, especially on larger sites, and because my own preliminary tests of Joomla 1.5 and Mambo 4.6 showed that this was in fact not true. Now, with this new release I will test their performance again and compare the two head to head to see what is indeed the case. Stay tuned for more info on that bit.

The launch of the comments component is indeed a strange and interesting turn of events too. First of all: There are already quite a few comment components out there, both standalone and forum integrated ones. Is MamboTeam trying to squeeze some 3rd party developers out of the market, or are they filling a gap because of lack of functionality in existing solutions? In either case I think it’s good because comment functionality has, with the rise of the blog format in recent years, become a neccessity in personal webpages. This can possibly get more bloggers to check out Mambo in the future? Other questions that pop into mind: Will Joomla follow? What is next? Trackback and blogpinging?

Here is a copy-paste of the elements mentioned in the Mamboserver newsflash:

• A new Language Manager that makes translating the Mambo core into additional languages a breeze.
• Totally revamped embedded Help Screens for context-sensitive help – users no longer need to be connected to the Internet to access help files.
• Improved MySQL5 compatibility and general database performance.
• A new customizable WYSIWYG editor, MOStlyCE, based on the latest version of TinyMCE – provides greatly improved editing and content formatting.
• More efficient code generates significantly fewer database calls giving 4.6 better performance over previous versions of Mambo – and over competing systems.
• Several new variations of the default CSS-based template, which provides a great building block for the creation of custom templates.
• Enhanced security makes 4.6 the most secure Mambo ever.
• A new content module for displaying the most recent content items in their entirety.
• A new comments component so site visitors can add comments to content items.

Technorati Tags: Mambo, Mambo 4.6, mambo features, joomla, blogging