Mambo nr 5 and Cake PHP

I feel like I’ve been in the stone age the latter part of this year, but saw tonight that the new release of Mambo (version 5) is going to be powered by CakePHP. Wow! Interesting move. If you do not know this, Joomla! used to be Mambo and a lot of the Joomla! version 1.0.x code is still like mosMainBody or mosLoadModule. mos as in Mambo Open Source. That was until there was some serious disagreement about corporate influence by the company who funded and founded Mambo, Miro International. You can read more about that saga here. Ever since the fork between Mambo and Joomla! it has been Joomla! pretty much all the way for me.

What is kind of strategic interesting is that Mambo nr 5 will be powered by a great (Open Source) PHP MVC framework called CakePHP. I’m undoubtedly a Code Igniter fan, but Cake, although more complex/heavyweight, is a pretty good MVC framework! So I think this is a very clever/sensible move on Mambo’s side. Joomla! 1.5 reinvented the MVC wheel by developing their own MVC framework for developing plug-ins. This means that although you have been developing Joomla! components up to now, you will have to learn the MVC side of 1.5 from scratch if you want to use it.

Mambo users, both old and new can start playing with CakePHP and get a feel for how it would work in Nr 5. They might even win a couple of new supporters with this move to CakePHP. I’m dead sure the old supporters would not mind either as the API was starting to feel a bit outdated anyway.

I know this goes without saying, but it is less obvious given the nature of how Cake works, and that is whether existing Mambo components would be completely backward compatible. I suppose that would depend on how deep the Cake integration is going to go. It would be suicide to throw away all the existing component code! Thats a no-no. Then again, as I said, it goes without saying! Joomla! 1.5 has its own new MVC built in with funky ways to do new components, but they made damn sure they cater for existing ones to some extent. Lets see how Mambo handles it.

What would be interesting to see is whether Mambo would be powered by Cake or whether Mambo would become a CMS built for Cake…

2 Comments to "Mambo nr 5 and Cake PHP"

• Mike said: On 11/15/2007 at 4:44 am

  One day, when I’m big, I really want to be able to understand what you write

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » PHP confusion - why do some software still insist on PHP4? said: On 02/02/2008 at 8:37 pm

  [...] PHP 4 reached its end of life the 31st December 2007. They will continue to fix bugs up until 08 August 2008. Yet, most of the biggest CMS software, guys like Joomla!, Drupal and Wordpress keep on supporting PHP 4 instead of PHP 5. Why on earth?! I do get it that you cannot predict what version of PHP would be on a shared host, but the hosting providers should pull up their socks and upgrade! [...]

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Filed in: PHP, Software Development, web development by: Stii