Mambo Changes its Name to Joomla!

Phil Shapiro writes "The popular open source content management system named Mambo has changed its name to Joomla! -- released under the GNU Public License. Some of the reasons for the name change are explained at MamboPortal.com. Joomla! is used by a very wide array of organizations and companies."

Comments

This is not good...

[Deltaspectre]

I thought it was pretty bad telling my friends I used Mambo...


Now I have to say I use Joomla!, which is almost as ridiculous as saying Yahoo! out loud...

Re:This is not good...

[ScrewMaster]

I would have picked "Mamboner" myself. But that's just me.

Re:This is not good...

[GCsoftware]

My UID is prime too. Can I be your friend?

Re:This is not good...

[bhsx]

I would have preferred Whomba!

Re:This is not good...

[bhsx]

I'm affiliated with the developers, and have taken it upon myself to form the Joomla! Foundation in order to make us look as serious as the big boys. The Joomla! Foundation will oversee the liscensing of intellectual properties and future directions of the Joomla! project. I look forward to working with the devs, none of which are on the newly appointed board.
???
Profit!

Re:This is not good...

[doxology]

Hey! I'm also prime! And I think we should replace all H20 with D20!

Re:This is not good...

[Wolfrider]

Yeah, that's great. You're affiliated with people that chose the WORST NAME EVAR.

Heh, j/k. Kinda.

Awesome

[cnerd2025]

Soon, with Ubuntu and Joomba, we'll be experts in Swahili! ;-) That'd be kind of cool though.

Re:Awesome

[mrL1nX]

Actually Ubuntu comes from isiZulu and Xhosa. Directly translated from isiZulu it means: Humanity

Re:Awesome

[cnerd2025]

^Ignorant American ;-)

Re:Awesome

[mrL1nX]

me = South African :P

Re:Awesome

[test007]

Joomla actually means something in Arabic. It means "sentence" (not the kind that comes with a prison but the kind that means a collection of words).

Re:Awesome

[compling]

Joomla, as they spell it, comes from Arabic originally, and means exactly the same thing : all together, or all of us.

(Sentence, as another reply suggests, is another word, which sounds much the same)

Re:Awesome

[test007]

The Saria is a collection of paragraphs you moron.

And what does this thing do, exactly?

[Animats]

You can only use a stupid name if you have a really big advertising budget.

Re:And what does this thing do, exactly?

[FLAGGR]

Case in point: Vista

Re:And what does this thing do, exactly?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Amen. It was cute when Yahoo! had an exclamation point, but Joomla! is just kinda weird.

Re:And what does this thing do, exactly?

[legirons]

"You can only use a stupid name if you have a really big advertising budget."

Or thousands of users who explain it any any opportunity.

Their friends are just getting used to hearing about plone and zope...

Of Course

[AAeyers]

The real reason they changed to Joomla! is that it is just more fun to say.

Re:Of Course

[secolactico]

At least it doesn't start with "free", i'm rather tired of that.

I'll see your sentiment and raise:

-- At least it's not called "something is not something". Acronym: "Sins".

-- At least it's not called "Just another something" (YAS?, JAS?)

If they couldn't use Mambo, they should have chosen a similar name: Merengue, Cumbia, Cha-cha-cha. Latin dances have such cute names. And they can always think of a meaning for the acronym after the fact.

Re:Of Course

[Ohreally_factor]

Woah! Back up there a minute. I think you hit upon something.

GNM has a certain ring to it, don't you think? AND it's recursive! How cool is that?!

Not you too!

[glitch13]

First P. Diddy, now Mambo? The Humanity!

GNU Public License?!

[chris_eineke]

The first letter in GPL is not GNU. It's the General Public License.

Re:GNU Public License?!

[daviqh]

" The first letter in GPL is not GNU. It's the General Public License."

For those of you who see "GNU" as one letter, we are very sorry for the confusion.

Re:GNU Public License?!

[cirisme]

Honestly, it should really be the GPL Public License. :)

Re:GNU Public License?!

[arodland]

Roger that. It's perfectly valid to call it the "GNU General Public License", but that's still GNU GPL.

Zombo

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have changed it to zombo.com. Anything is possible!

Re:Mambo Rocks

[Monoman]

Thanks for clarifying what Mambot is but I think you could have done it without the shameless plugging. ;-)

Should have chosen "NotMambo"

[teknomage1]

I personally would have gone with NotMambo. That way it's clear what they are and what they were.

Is it, or isn't it?

[Corvaith]

I don't think I'd call it 'changing their name'. I somehow suspect that we'll still be seeing releases as Mambo from the group still affiliated with the original company, and releases of this Joomla! from this group.

And I'm extremely wary about downloading anything put out by people who can't spell or form cohesive sentences. From the announcement:

"Mambo has changed it's name to Joomla! today. After the develpers of the award wining content management system Mambo has left the rights holder of Mambo, the australian company Miro, they established a new website and will release the first version of Joomla!, which will be version 1.0.0, soon."

To which I say... huh? Somebody needs to remember things like tenses, capitalization of proper nouns, and the difference between it's and its.

Re:Is it, or isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor spelling and grammar gives the reader the initial impression that the writer is either too poorly educated or too lazy to come across properly. (If they can't be bothered to produce a quality press release, why should I believe they would produce a quality product?)

Saying "I'm a programmer, I don't need to know how to spell" shows how little some programmers understand what it takes to be taken seriously by regular people (like those who make business decisions).

Re:Is it, or isn't it?

[Dollar Sign TA]

Actually, the meaning of the sentence isn't clear. The spelling mistakes are ok to read past, but the poor grammar and use of tenses make it very difficult to read throught the full paragraph. Furthermore, it does reflect on the product itself. It shows carelessness and unprofessionalism. What legitimate company doesn't have someone strong in english who they can at least get to read over a paragraph?

Re:Is it, or isn't it?

[Nasarius]

Saying "I'm a programmer, I don't need to know how to spell" shows how little some programmers understand what it takes to be taken seriously by regular people (like those who make business decisions).

Forget "regular people"; it's necessary for communication between developers. It took me, a native English speaker, a couple reads to understand that sentence. Imagine trying to communicate with people around the world like that. Linus and all the other big-name kernel developers write very well. Unless you're working on your own all the time, good communication skills are not an option.

Re:Is it, or isn't it?

[AEton]

And I'm extremely wary about downloading anything put out by people who can't spell or form cohesive sentences.

What are you doing on Slashdot?

Re:Is it, or isn't it?

[Makarakalax]

Actually it shows how little you understand about open source or commercial software development. But that doesn't surprise me, slashdot is where everyone pretends to know so much about these things, but actually they all prove how little they know whenever they write a post.

You are totally right about the impact of poor spelling of course. It's just that programmers of commercial software don't have to care about marketing and programmers of open source software often really don't care about marketing. And yes this means they also don't care about being taken seriously by regular people (even those who make business decsions). You have to understand that many open source programmers really do only write the code for the sake of writing something cool, they don't give a shit if you like them, like the code or like the software. They especially don't give a shit if you find their spelling and grammar poor.

Re:Is it, or isn't it?

[kwoff]

Saying "I'm a programmer, I don't need to know how to spell" shows how little some programmers understand what it takes to be taken seriously by regular people

I've never understood how programmers could be bad spellers or bad with grammar. I don't mean a typo here and there, but rather for example consistently writing "depricated" or "rediculous". I just wonder how you can be sloppy in written communication while at the same time be a good programmer (though I've seen plenty of examples that prove it is in fact possible).

I bin down to see...

[bushboy]

me Auntie Joomla, eerie ?
Dem Mambo boys am batty wid dis namin ting.

Sounds like a load of

[Andy_R]

mumbo jumbo to me!

Re:Mambo Rocks

[Agret]

He also plugged here:

Here not long ago. I remember reading his post.

But since he's a subscriber I think we can forgive him :)

Re:Mambo Rocks

[Nerd Systems]

Mambots are actually things inside of Mambo, to show pictures, and do other features, without having to code and what not... Mambo is the content management system itself... Another impressive thing... is that Mambo is so clean and efficient code-wise... I've had my site /. a few times, and each time my server has had no problems keeping up with the traffic... very impressive for an open source content management server... able to handle high-traffic sites with ease... Amazing what sites powered by Linux can do... all for FREE... I could care less WHAT they call it, as long as they keep providing such high-quality software as this... for FREE... By the way, if I was to do a shameless plug, I would say go to my websites, and click on the Google Ads... but that would just be wrong :)

Meesa gonna use Joomla!

[Spy Handler]

the preferred CMS of Jar Jar

Re:Name Changes are Good

[CDMA_Demo]

Whats up with Gandhi these days? I thought it was only me doing this shit.

Re:I don't get it

[Nick of NSTime]

I agree with you. I tried to use Mambo for my soon-to-be-launched entertainment site, but I couldn't get it to work the way I expected to. That's not to say that Mambo sucks; rather, Mambo was taking too long to figure out, so I switched to Geeklog.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[aftk2]

Of course, it's no coincidence that both the sites you linked to are much more alike (functionally) than they are different.

That's the double-edged sword of powerful systems like Mambo (and drupal for that matter, which I have used for community.auditionrocks.com, although more out of expediency than anything else): they excel at making sites that really require exactly the features that they offer, and no more. That may sound like a stupid statement, but it's no surprise that the vast majority of Mambo-powered and drupal-powered sites have a distinct Mambo or Drupal look and feel. At their best, they let you go from prototyping to actual building very quickly; at their worst, they dictate design. And breaking out of the CMSs presentation paradigm can frequently become more trouble than it's worth.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[s7uar7]

I agree. I hate it when people show off about having a girlfriend.

Sweet mother of God

[HisMother]

Why would anyone change the name of their product from a semi-reasonable English word, to a nonsense word that any adult would feel embarrassed to say out loud? I can't imagine a better way to scare off potential new users.

Not that the company had a good business idea, or anything, but this is exactly the thing that made sure "Flooz.com" was DOA.

Re:Sweet mother of God

[pbailey]

Hard to say if it was a good choice or not. Look at google - that's not exactly a normal word, and before they became big you may have felt a tad shy telling your customers that "we should use google to do our searching". I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens. To me the important thing is that they keeping making an excellent CMS product, and I believe that they will.

Re:Sweet mother of God

[tepples]

Look at google - that's not exactly a normal word

Is it? Do you forget 10^100 or the comic strip that spun off Snuffy Smith ?

Re:Sweet mother of God

[cuzality]

10^100 is spelled googol, not google.

Re:Sweet mother of God

[TheLittleJetson]

a nonsense word that any adult would feel embarrassed to say out loud

Technically, you don't say it so much as you exclaim it.

isiZulu

[Dlugar]

"isiZulu" is simply the word for the Zulu language in Zulu itself. Likewise "isiXhosa" is the name for the Xhosa language in Xhosa itself. (The "isi-" is a grammatical prefix that distinguishes the adverb from, say, a Zulu or Xhosa person.)

So it really makes more sense to either say "Zulu and Xhosa" or "isiZulu and isiXhosa". I'd recommend the former, since "isiZulu" and "isiXhosa" aren't really English words.

Dlugar

Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[CyricZ]

Indeed, it is quite disgraceful when such major web developers are unable to write valid XHTML (in this case) for their own website.

Check if for yourself:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .joomla.org%2F

As of this time, seven errors are reported, plus a number of warnings.

It's difficult to tell whether it is a lack of ability, a lack of initiative, or a lack of quality control. Perhaps it is a mixture of all three factors. Regardless, it makes their project look bad. Very bad.

The least that one should expect from a web developer is that the developer's own website is standards-conformant. The lack of professionalism shown by this group of web developers rubs off on all open source developers, unfortunately.

They are, however, far better than PHP-Nuke, which currently offers 96 errors[1] on their homepage.

References:
[1] http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.phpnu ke.org/

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[CyricZ]

It's those kind of minor errors that are totally unacceptable. If they code HTML poorly enough to forget to use end tags, then I hesitate to even consider how terrible their PHP code is. That is not the kind of system I would use for a personal web site, let alone one that is for a client or a business.

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[khendron]

Is there a CMS or web design software site out there that actually passes the W3C test with no errors?

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[gst]

Plone generates valid XHTML code. However currently the Plone site itself doesn't pass the test as someone forgot to include the ALT tag when adding the 'New Orleans' donate code.

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[AndreiK]

Actually, looking through the errors, I saw that most of them were caused by the error parser, not the actual site. They had a url that had a "&" character inside quotes. That error caused the parser to assume that there was a variable undefined in the website, and caused about 5 other errors.

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[dracvl]

Fixed. ;)

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[ae]

No, the problem is not with the validator's parser. The "&" character has specific meaning in SGML and XML. It is used to start an entity reference. If you want a verbatim apersand you need to use "&".

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[CyricZ]

As stated previously, it is not a problem with the W3C's validator. The site designers have just plain failed to write standards-conformant code. And if they don't care enough to write clean, standards-conformant XHTML, then I don't trust them to be able to write secure and quality PHP code. There is no way I'll use their product when they fail to take such basic quality factors into account.

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[dedazo]

ROFL. You know, I was talking to GCC the other day and I said comon now you evil compiler, it was just a typo! One letter in a 300,000 line app! Why don't you try being nicer for a change and go ahead and finish so Mr. Linker can take over, huh?

Validation is absolute. A page either validates or it doesn't.

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[geckofiend]

What color is the sky on your planet? Down here on Earth developers don't waste precious cycles fixing a non-issue bug.

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[dedazo]

What color is the sky on your planet?

In my planet there's a difference between a compile error and a defect. In the case of markup validation, a parser error is analogous to a compile error because, again, validation must be absolute. The fact that a page fails validation can be considered a defect, which while not my cup of tea I suppose is something people like you do. But then there's no point on generating "valid markup" and adding that DOCTYPE dec to begin with, is there?

So... what planet are you from? I hear that in Uranus compilers are allowed to generate object files if the developer merely wishes that to occur. That would be freakin' swheet.

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[tajmorton]

CMS Made Simple does. It's used on my site: Confirmed Here

Re:Invalid markup from such people is a disgrace.

[jlleblanc]

"It's difficult to tell whether it is a lack of ability, a lack of initiative, or a lack of quality control. Perhaps it is a mixture of all three factors."

Try thousands of users who get very irritated with us when we make much simpler changes to the codebase!

A completely rewritten, XHTML based, 508/WAI compliant, PHP 5 object-oriented is in the works (formerly to be Mambo 5, now to be Joomla 2). In the mean time, we're working on issues our users have actually requested, such as better language support.

"The lack of professionalism shown by this group of web developers rubs off on all open source developers, unfortunately."

Actually, the courtesy and respect our users experience gives open source a good name. More often than not, instead of telling newcomers to RTFM, we answer their questions, even if it's something simple that's been answered a thousand times. Because of this, we now have a rapidly growing userbase of people who may not necessarily be programmers, but can help new users with their questions. For many, Joomla is the first piece open-source they've ever used and they come away with an extremely good impression.

I would not deal with you because of your site.

[CyricZ]

It looks very unprofessional for a site basically selling your services to contain advertisements along the side. I would be hesitant to deal with a doctor who stuck advertisements on the side of his office sign, just as I would be with a computer systems developer who sticks ads all over his commercial website.

Not only that, but the ads are very religious in nature. Perhaps Google took the "customer service" text to mean "religious service", and thus stuck religious ads all along the right side.

Thanks for the attempt, but I would not deal with you because of the appearance and content of your website.

Re:I would not deal with you because of your site.

[Nerd Systems]

Thanks for the honesty... this site isn't giving me any business actually, I just built it to have a presence and to play around pretty much...
If your wanting to give some suggestions, feel free to comment on ways to make it better... always glad to listen to suggestions and make it a better site...
All of my work is currently from referrals, so while I may SUCK at websites, at least I do great in customer service :)
I have no problem with religious ads showing... I am a strong Christian and Jesus is in my life, so let them show all they want :)

Re:I would not deal with you because of your site.

[Ohreally_factor]

I read that as "Jesus is in my wife" and did a double take.

Re:I would not deal with you because of your site.

[CyricZ]

I'd lose the ads first of all. Even if you're not getting any actual business, it still is a site promoting your business, and as such should appear professional.

I'm glad that you're a faithful Christian. Good for you. However, that has absolutely nothing to do with how well you fix or set up computer systems.

Re:I would not deal with you because of your site.

[MyHair]

Not only that, but the ads are very religious in nature. Perhaps Google took the "customer service" text to mean "religious service", and thus stuck religious ads all along the right side.

Joomla is a brother god to Jobu, apparently.

I'm so excited!

[Matt Perry]

Wow! A! new! name! that! conveys! excitement! Way! to! go! Joomla! developers! I'm! looking! forward! to! checking! out! the! 1.0! release!

On a serious note, I'm wondering what this will mean for Miro and Mambo. If Mambo has a lot of mind share then it will take some work for the Joomla people to communicate that they are the new development branch. Since Joomla is GPL then there is nothing stopping Miro from taking Joomla, renaming it to Mambo, and continuing to market it. In that case it'd be both perfectly legal and the original developers would still be writing code for Miro. Miro could continue to keep the mind share that they have invested in Mambo. I wonder how the Joomla developers plan to counteract that and market their product.

Re:I'm so excited!

[hlbog]

So they can converge to a new and unique project! :) Well, youre right. But you must think that each group will have their own "management team", and these teams are responsible for make decisions on where invest effort, like new features, redesign... Maybe the ideias for the future of the project were not the same between the former development team and the Miro Corp, so the breach. That way, it is not expected that one of them would want to just keep "repacking" the other work.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[Casshan]

If you want strict control over the layout and function of a web site, then you would probably want to switch from a content management system to a content management framework. Content management frameworks are an order of magnitute more complex to setup, but with that complexity comes absolute freedom of functionality and layout.

I started out using CMS systems like Drupal and Mambo, but have switched to building CMS systems with Typo3 and haven't looked back since. There is very little you can't do in Typo3, and there is no 'default' look for a Typo3 created site. You have absolute freedom in layout. Typo3 has a learning curve measured in weeks, but the rewards are definately worth it.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[Nerd Systems]

Actually, more like a great server stress test...

Server is ticking away... taking the brunt of this attack... I love it :)

I'm bored, about to go to a birthday party, so figured I would play for a bit before we head out...

Bored Nerds are dangerous, lol

Re:Offtopic, but I have no blog to rant in.

[martyn s]

I find your comment to be contradictory. If you are on big on animal rights why do you hate pets because it is cruel?

Jamloo!?

[Bambi Dee]

Wow, that's even harder to remember than my own domain name (which is fine by me). I keep thinking JamLoo! or Roomba! -- besides, exlamation mark names mess up my punctuation!. Ah, well.

The cost of bad names

[teneighty]

This is an unfortunate example of why most geeks shouldn't be allowed to name things.

Naming things is tough in this day of domain name squatters, which makes it very tempting to go with meaningless invented names (or names that sound that way to most people - e.g. "Ogg Vorbis"). Weird names are fine for things that don't require much investment to sample them -- but for the case where it does represent a significant investment (in either time, money, or risk) then a weird name can be a severe handicap to the adoption of that product.

Re:The cost of bad names

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, geeks pick terrible names. That's why MP3s never took off. Or DVDs. And why the much snappier "LaserDiscs" did so well.

People don't care about weird names.

Re:The cost of bad names

[Kjella]

This is an unfortunate example of why most geeks shouldn't be allowed to name things.

Or maybe just as much, not daring to use any normal name for the fear of C&Ds from everyone with a remotely similar name or running a completely differnet business. Remember Phoeni... Firebir... Firefox? Most OSS projects will consider that a complete waste of time. All the developers and those "in the know" will know it, and that is enough. And the rest will just have to figure out that "Linux" is a kernel, "Apache" a webserver and so on.

Kjella

Re:The cost of bad names

[cgenman]

Tell that to Kodak, Albertsons, Google, Cisco, Viagra, etc.

It's not the name... It's the lack of exposure. If someone is familiar with a name, they will have positive feelings about it and will feel more comfortable with the application / company. But most companies spend as much on advertising as they do on development. When was the last time you saw a 20-person open source development team with 20 full-time promoters?

Pick a dumb name, stick to it, and batter people with it like there is no tomorrow. They'll make the connections on their own.

Re:The cost of bad names

[philovivero]

"This name was chosen from thousands of recommendations by the community, and even went through an arduous review session by branding and marketing professionals who also felt that Joomla! was the best choice of the lot."

Re:The cost of bad names

[CowboyBob500]

branding and marketing professionals

That certainly explains a lot.

Bob

Re:The cost of bad names

[aaronl]

Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. Do you have any idea how hard it is to recommend programs with names like Firefox, Thunderbird, and worst of all, GIMP? People think that you messing with them, and others see a program with a name like that installed, and cause quite a commotion.

They're all good programs, and I do recommend them to people, but it's making adoption quite difficult for some of them.

Here are a few other programs that *really* should rename themselves: GRUB, Slackware, LyX, LaTeX, and countless others. So many of them are wonderful programs that are having an absolutely amount of difficulty being deployed and recommended simply because of names with negative or offensive connotations.

somehow it just happened

[v1]

I saw "Mambo" and "joomba" and for some reason my mind went immediately to

Roomba.

Re:somehow it just happened

[Skuldo]

you saw joomBa? =P

Re:Offtopic, but I have no blog to rant in.

[utnow]

this is offtopic so this isn't really the place for the discussion

but... Peta is anti-pets, anti-mascots, against the use of animals in anyway whatsoever for our amusement.

Boos!

[fm6]

Mambo! Joomla! Sis ra ra! Ginko farly! Iss bata!

What doctor do you go to?

[OmniBeing]

Seriously, where is this mythical physician? I have yet to find a doctors office that doesn't have "infoposters" of this medicine or that plastered all over the place. In fact, a doctors office is one of the places where you'll find the most ads strewn around the walls and windows. I challenge you to find a doctors office that is ad free, let me know, and I'll send him a gift basket for not accepting the kickbacks that come with the infomercial posters.

Re:What doctor do you go to?

[jma05]

Doctors don't really get any kickbacks from these posters. Usually the first rep that comes with the poster that makes sense to the doctor gets the space. If another rep comes with a better looking and more informative poster, it takes over. Poster choice rarely has anything to do with who makes them.

Re:What doctor do you go to?

[OmniBeing]

Let me clarify, they get kickbacks for accepting and pushing the free samples, which come with posters.

Re:What doctor do you go to?

[CyricZ]

Maybe your American doctors have succumbed to advertising. Our British doctors have not.

Re:What doctor do you go to?

[OmniBeing]

This is totally off topic flamebait, but you assume I'm americian.

Re:What doctor do you go to?

[CyricZ]

Perhaps you're Canadian, which is basically the same as being American. Maybe your doctor only has four advertisement posters, instead of the typical five or more at an American doctor's office.

Bias?

[saterdaies]

Am I the only one who things this article is incredibly biased? I mean, Mambo isn't changing it's name. There will still be a Mambo. Joomla! is a project created based off of Mambo by a lot of the Mambo developers, but it isn't the new name of Mambo.

Wait. . .this just in Red Hat Linux changes its name to SUSE (insofar as SUSE was based off RH and so clearly it is just a name change and whatever that Red Hat company continues to do isn't real).

Now, there is a VERY strong argument that Joomla! is where all the big Mambo developers are moving and that it will be more Mambo than Mambo, but the post is libelous because Mambo isn't changing it's name. Mambo is staying around with the Mambo name.

Re:Bias?

[rekrutacja]

It's not a bias. It's realism. Development of Mambo in Miro seems to be non-existent and this project hardly has any future... Look at this:

Due to the recent departure of the old dev team, the programming team at Miro will continue with the development of Mambo in the interim period. We are actively recruiting for members of the community who would like to contribute as developers and moderators, and all other areas of Mambo. Should you be interested, please email info@mamboserver.com."

source: http://www.mamboserver.com/

Re:Bias?

[Donny Smith]

> It's realism. Development of Mambo in Miro seems

How is it reality when you yourself use the word "seems"?

> Due to the recent departure of the old dev team, the programming team at Miro will continue with the development of Mambo in the interim period.

It doesn't matter. It's the Jumbo folks who forked, so Mambo is still Mambo, and these new bozos are Jambo or whatever.
It's like when Samba developers forked off Samba TNG (which subsequently got marginalized, which is quite hitful as to what's going to happen to these Jumbo guys.)

It's not about developers, it's about the structure and system. The Mambo team can find a few coders, even outsource, and keep going (if you've ever used Mambo yourself, you'd realize it's full of fucking bugs and problems, nowhere near the level of quality provided by Plone or other CMS).

Re:Bias?

[rekrutacja]

What constitutes a project? People working on it? Or trademark? If entire team changes the name of the project for some legal reason - that doesn't constitute a fork. If entire team decides to break relationship with some smaller or bigger corporation - that also doesn't constitute a fork.
Names and business relations are important, they help gaining marketshare. But word "fork" is not about marketshare, it's about different technical decisions. Here we got the very same, entire team of developers, so this doesn't apply. You say "structure and system": this is true in a world of proprietary software, where all the code stays with rigts holder. But this is free software.

Re:Bias?

[teknomage1]

It's not libelous as libel implies ill intent. It's factually incorrect, but it is not under the scope of the law libel. (Yay media ethics class)

Joomla! vs Drupal Differences?

[pixelcort]

I'd also like to know about the differences between the two.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[MHobbit]

Believe it or not, many other CMSs do the exact same thing. Page restriction based on login status is a common feature among various CMSs, and coded easily enough.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[chronicon]

Actually, I was glad to see examples of Mambo in action myself. Providing such and getting a plug in at the same time, eh, that's not such a bad thing at all...

Re:Bias? [mod parent up]

[kalleh]

This article is not just biased but intentionally plain wrong. This would be like saying XFree86 has been renamed to x.org.

Stupid

[Mensa Babe]

I think it is very stupid to include punctuation marks other than hyphens and apostrophes in trade marks. It not only looks like a childish Yahoo rip-off but is an obvious trick to make people end every single sentence including such a trade mark with an exclamation mark or otherwise risk having misleading punctuation in the middle of a sentence where it certainly does not belong. I hope they will change the name to just Joomla because I refuse to use marks of admiration in my writing when it doesn't reflect my way of thinking. Period.

Re:Stupid

[Makarakalax]

I think it is very stupid when people end sentences with "Period". Unless your talking about menstrual cycles.

Re:Stupid

[Rocketship Underpant]

I agree completely. Exclamation points are typographical symbols, not letters you can use in an English word. Punctuation symbols are governed by linguistic convention, not by trademark registrations. The exclamation point may be part of Yahoo's logo, but it's not part of their name any more than red capitalized letters are. I certainly make no attempt to pronounce it when I speak.

Re:Stupid

[cailyoung]

! is a pronouncable character in some African dialects. From Wikipedia: In Khoi, Bushmen, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, the exclamation mark is used as a letter to indicate the retroflex click sound represented as q in Zulu orthography. In Unicode this letter is properly coded as U+01C3 (?) and distinguished from the common punctuation symbol U+0021 (!) to allow software to deal properly with word breaks.

Re:Stupid

[Rocketship Underpant]

Well, next time I'm discussing Yahoo with a fellow bushman in the Khoi language, I'll be sure to included my exclamation letters and make the appropriate clicking sounds. :)

I read that as

[future assassin]

JoMamma

anybody got screenshots?

[dankelley]

I'm looking for a CMS and I'd like to compare. As folks are saying here, it's not easy keeping the names of various alternatives in mind. I went to the site of this CMS, looking for screenshots, but saw none. Anybody care to post some?

Confession: I wrote the site of this CMS above, since I had forgotten the name of the site in the time it took to come back to /. to post this. So that's a sign that either (a) this new name has little sticking power or (b) um, what was I talking about?

Re:anybody got screenshots?

[null etc.]

Super comprehensive comparison matrix of CMS products:

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/cms-matrix?func=vi ewDetail&listingId=VwUTL75eyPbKiKAxG3cbKA

Following site allows you to test out live demos of open source CMS products, no login or registration required:

http://opensourcecms.com/

Re:anybody got screenshots?

[dankelley]

Thanks very much for this. It will help me a great deal.

It was either this

[suitepotato]

or they continue the dance theme and Lambada, Macarena, Hustle, and Cabbage Patch creeped out the testers' signifigant others who caught them attempting the namesake dances. To their relief, the testers haven't figured out what a Joomla is and are now slightly less embarassing.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[LnxAddct]

I know alot of folks have criticized your site, but I mean really, it looks like a teenager's blog or something. If you want to see increased business, redesign a more professional site, and don't have that animation at the top with the blinking "ftp" http" "sql" etc... its almost as bad as the blink tag. Make your sight simple and elegant, not complex, not black, and don't have ads. Your selling a service, your revenue isn't based off of ads. If your services suck so bad that you need ads to support it then it says something about your service and I would think that alot of people would be hesitant to use it.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Name Changes are Good

[teknomage1]

Whats up with Gandhi these days? I thought it was only me doing this shit.

Huh? I don't understand.

Name sucks. Here's why:

[Qbertino]

I had a list of names posted. It was the first suggestion in the forums that had more than one entry. (I'm good at making names - better than most nerds that is). One guy did a summary of all names posted and completely ignored/overlooked mine. Half of those had some sort of branding quality, as at least a third in the forums were very good.

The problem with Joomla! is the lack of speech rythym. If you have a chance to use a fantasy name - and most OSS projects couldn't care less if the name is known and speakable in most countries - such as the name "Diesel" which became a well know clothing brand (very smart pick for a name, just like "amazon").

Take for instance "Rivett" or "Engine" (Engine was one of my suggestions), or even a silly name like "TittyTwister". All of these have at least one vowel at all sylable borders, which makes them easier to memorize, speak, pronounce and spell. With "Engine" being an exeption because it's pronouced different from it's spelling. A good tradeoff if you like the associations the name causes.

Bottom line:
Nothing agains a complete fantasy name - on the contrary. In the end you have better brand recognition. But you should let people who have experience at naming do it. Especially when so many marketing experts offer their help as they did with Joomla!. Joomla! looks cool, that why lots of people in the marketing industry use it. Many would've like to pay back by helping out with branding and such. It's a shame the core team didn't go along.

Then again, I've seen crappier names than Joomla! in the OSS world, so I guess I should be glad.

Re:Name sucks. Here's why:

[CircleFusion]

One guy did a summary of all names posted and completely ignored/overlooked mine. That guy would be me. There have been a handful of people who complained about me overlooking their suggestions in the list that I created. Quite frankly, that response pisses me off. I spent many hours scouring through that horrific thread where people essentially vomited their name suggestions to the screen without any concern for the guidelines set forth by the Core Team and without any sense of concern for trademarks or available TLD names. Many people simply ignored the conversation and even submitted names that had already been submitted multiple times. That thread is the worst case scenario of what can happen when a project's development is in the hands of the open source community. As I said multiple times ont hat forum, the thorn in the side of the open source community is disorganization. What I did was attempt to start the organization process of that mess. My list resulted in 486 names. That was only a starting point. Soon after, cmeister2 created a database from my list where the names could be further organized, and overlooked names or newly submitted names could be added. If I overlooked your precious name, then you could've added it to his list, that is, if you were paying attention to the conversation within those threads. Most of the names on that list were horrible, but even some of them were better than the Joomla! name. They could've done better. I wish the Core Development team would've appointed someone to organize that discussion. They could've taken cmeister2's database and php script and created a quick voting module out of it to get feedback from the very users and community developers of their CMS. They could've pooled together the potential strength of the community. Only organization will do that. If I would've organized that list, I would've first started an open discussion to establish guidelines, such as the name shouldn't be similar to mambo. After establishing guidelines, I would then setup a quick script where people can submit names based upon those guidelines. If their suggestion did not fit the guidelines, then the submission gets thrown out. That way, they have 60 quality names instead of 500 names that mostly are not usable. A big concern with the name choosing was that viewers (or perhaps someone representing Miro) might poach the domain names that were suggested. To prevent that, I would create a group of volunteers, perhaps 20-30 who have a reputable background within the Mambo community, to finalize the discussion of the new name in a private forum. I can say that the logo discussion is going a little better than the name discussion. They could just do better. I will stay updated with Joomla! development, but I'm personally focusing my efforts on Xaraya

Re:Name sucks. Here's why:

[cmeister2]

I completely agree... but then I am biased :D I wish they'd have *considered* my list.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

heh, "server stress test"... you've said that a couple of times already, and it wasn't a particularly good comeback the first time. Face it, your site sucks, your shameless plugs are annoying, and nobody cares if your site gets a good slashdotting.

Love, Jesus

Invalid markup from Slashdot is a disgrace.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Go ahead and TRY to see what happens when you TRY to run Slashdot, the prime butt trumpet of "standards complience" through the W3C validators. Go ahead! OH! Is that a "403 Forbidden"? Hmm....

Re:Invalid markup from Slashdot is a disgrace.

[aaronl]

Heh, it.slashdot.org will run through it, though.

Result: Failed validation, 104 errors
Address: http://it.slashdot.org/
Encoding: iso-8859-1
Doctype: HTML 3.2

That's not so hot at all! Lots and lots of table syntax errors and other things...

Also . . .

[Dausha]

Jumla may be Swahili, but it is derived from the Arabic word of the same name. So, they're trying to broaden their market.

Miro will also have to change their name now, since Miro and Mambo had the same beginning syllable. So, I look forward to seeing the founding of a new company: Jiro!

The Real Reason . . .

[Dausha]

The real reason for the name change was because Mambo.org was already taken: http://mambo.org/.

Dude... *Content* *Management* *System*

[Sr. Pato]

It's not rocket science. Just a little common sense;
"Content Management System" => "A System that Manages Content"...
Since it's a web-application, you can safely assume that it's "A System that Manages Content on the Web". How do you present content through the web? I know! A "Website".

Put 2 & 2 together... Geesh...

Re:Dude... *Content* *Management* *System*

[ari_j]

There are a million types of CMS. There are blog engines, Slash clones, WYSIWYG HTML editors, XSLT systems, and so forth. He used the phrase "content management system" in his post, so you can assume that he knows what a CMS is, he just doesn't know what makes this one so special. I don't, either.

Re:Offtopic, but I have no blog to rant in.

[Trinn]

Yet more offtopicness...

South Park said it best. PETA doesn't care about humans.

Re:Name Changes are Good

[CDMA_Demo]

Look at the parent...

Re:Mambo Rocks

[cdcarter]

In your network services bit, It's spelled Novell. not Novel. Also, The color scheme makes it really hard to read. And lose the ads.

why?

[XO]

Why does every move of a CMS interest Slashdot?

Isn't Slashdot a CMS?

Boggle.

The knights who say what?

[bakkus]

We are now... no longer the Knights Who Say 'Mambo'.
We are now the Knights Who Say 'Joomla!- ecky- ecky- ecky- pikang- zoop- boing- goodem- zoo- owli- zhiv'.

Ugh!

[Wabbit Wabbit]

worst.name.evar.

And now If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go play with my Joomla!

Joomla!? Mambo? JAMBA?

[iGN97]

Damn you, crazy frog, and your ability to ruin any song and any day, regardless of weather and earning potential. Please leave open source alone.

Re:Joomla!? Mambo? JAMBA?

[Mishra100]

I would have taken Jamba over
Joomla(exclaimationpoint)

Names should communicate clearly

[chris_7d0h]

People don't care about weird names.

They do.
Ever looked at the credits after a movie?
I'd wager 1/3 to 1/2 of the actors in the list have changed their name. Either because their previous names were too convoluted for the average American to pronounce (e.g. they might have ancestral ties to other countries) or they had too common names, meaning they needed to change them to stick out just enough.
This example simply shows that names are very important to us when it comes to instances of types.

When it comes to the specific types (e.g. types of technology) themselves however, we tend not to care that much what names we use to classify the different things with. Since many of these things stem from science (discovery) we might lack prior art and have settled with the fact that "new stuff will yields new names". Our perception of the new stuff is formed by what it can do for us (after having seen or read about it) and so "strange" names like Turbo, Laser, Gasoline, Homo sapien etc. get established and recognized by many as types.

What would help tremendously though when naming new stuff (types) would be to look at the traits of the concept and pick a name communicating the intent of the type. This would help people quickly pick up what the thing is about and speed up awareness immensely.

E.g. Say you invented a strap which you could tie around a dog's neck and also attach a leach to. Now instead of giving that thing a name like Smorgasbord, wouldn't a name like Dog Collar be easier to remember? Wouldn't it also convey better the intent of the device to people not yet familiar with this new thing? The concept collar is already familiar for most people and to distinguish this new type variant from the one humans use, adding the type name of the intended wearer will avoid any confusion in the morning.

So, is Joomla a good name? Perhaps not. Will it be catastrophic? perhaps not. Could a better name have resulted in wider awareness in shorter time? Personally I think so.

Re:Names should communicate clearly

[cornface]

I'd wager 1/3 to 1/2 of the actors in the list have changed their name.

Please provide a source for your belief other than "it seems like a good argument!"

Now instead of giving that thing a name like Smorgasbord, wouldn't a name like Dog Collar be easier to remember?

Yes, but it's a generic term. Good luck protecting that for your brand name any more than "bookshelf," "dishwasher," "facial tissue," or "coffee cup."

Re:Names should communicate clearly

[westlake]

Please provide a source for your belief other than "it seems like a good argument!"

It's never been unusual. Bela Lugosa, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe...

Re:seriously with the Exclamation point ! included

[robogun]

No it's domain squatters. Try and get any name that makes sense anymore and it belongs to a squatter. No combination of any two English words is unregistered. So now lots of nonsense words are being manufactured.

Thankfully most people have enough sense not to buy from squatters, so these squatters have to try to derive revenue by posting lame "search" pages on the domain spaces they occupy. But I guess once in a while someone stupid enough to buy does so and pays their registry bills.

I guess after this there will be a goldrush to register all the words in the Swahili dictionary...

A Lesson To Open Source Developers

[Master of Transhuman]

Trademark the fucking name before you get in bed with companies who you might need to fork from.

See, Linus was smart. Which is why we call it Linux, and not Joomix or SCOnix.

OH NO!! - Wait, who cares?

[boomgopher]

I dig XML as much as the next guy, and use it in a number of my software projects, BUT ONLY WHEN IT MATTERS

I keep hearing this vague shit about markup for mobile devices, etc. But, really, HTML 3/4 works fine, it's easy to code by hand, etc.



XHTML is dead, good riddance.

Re:OH NO!! - Wait, who cares?

[CyricZ]

Regardless of whether they're using XHTML or HTML, they should still be expected to design a page that is standards-conformant. The problem of standards-conformance is independent of whether they're using XHTML or HTML. It's the fact that they're not writing valid code that is the problem. Specifically the fact that they're designing and implementing a product that should, in all cases, produce valid code.

Re:OH NO!! - Wait, who cares?

[juhaz]

It BEGINS TO MATTER at the very instance when they output that XML declaration and DTD claiming their page is XHTML.

HTML4 is arguably fine for many things so fine, if you want to use it, use it, BUT DON'T TRY TO CLAIM OTHERWISE.

Besides, it's not valid HTML either, so that's not an excuse.

Re:GNU Public License?!Is that

[Lord Raze]

Is that anything like an ATM machine?

Yahoo! to sue Joomla! over patent infringement

[sidney]

Yahoo! has the patent on using punctuation in trademarks as a business method to create simulated excitement in otherwise independent reviews wherever they mention the name of the product being reviewd.

Get the facts straight...

[rdean400]

The core developers of Mambo have decided to continue the codebase under a new name. Mambo Foundation still owns Mambo and will continue development. You can argue about which one is the fork all you want, but the fact remains that there's still a fork. That's not good for open source adoption in business.

Re:GNU Public License?!Is that

[TeknoHog]

Is that anything like an ATM machine?

No, this is not a mistake, but intentional. In the spirit of GNU which stands for "GNU's Not Unix", GPL might just as well be "GPL Public License". These are recursive abbreviations, whereas "ATM machine" is a redundant abbreviation :)

Re:this is the breakaway group, isn't it?

[yelsohc]

Yes, this is the group that broke away and established opensourcematters.org. As you say, Mambo will still be Miro. As the Joomla! "birth release" mentions, the products are very similar now except for branding, but differences will most likely increase as time (and development) goes by.

As far as the choice of names:
When we reported this two days ago *cough* on our (Mambo based) tech website at texxors.com the article title was:

"Mambo core team of developers picks equally nonsensical name for new version"

(btw, we also suggested it to Slashdot at the time :)

Zombo.com

[Ribbo.com]

You can do ANYTHING at Joomla Com ......

cfkam

[cuteseal]

Dang... they rejected my suggestion to name it CFKAM - "CMS formerly known as Mambo"... :)

Re:seriously with the Exclamation point ! included

[MyHair]

No combination of any two English words is unregistered.

Surprisingly there are still some "my.....com" domains out there. I got one a couple of months ago but had to use a thesaurus and some associative brainstorming to find one related to my desired topic.

Also I found some surprising .info and .us domains available. I actually got my name's .us domain in May and my first and last names are quite common.

Also a lot of the squatters' registrations expire and registrars are auctioning them off as they expire before the return to nothingness. I haven't tried that so I don't know if you can get a good name or good deal.

Heh, I forgot I put one of my sites as my Slashdot home page. That link is Mambo-powered...I'll probably go with Joomla but I hate the name. My "my..." domain is linked from my home page, but the site isn't complete.

Welcome... to Zombo dot com..

[professorhojo]

http://www.zombo.com...

thought it fit the mood... =)

Re:Name Changes are Good

[teknomage1]

Hmm. Well, I don't get the parent either. Must not be my day.

Re:Offtopic, but I have no blog to rant in.

[Achromus]

But they should... 'cause humans are animals too.

Mambo, Joomla, Ajuba, Ubuntu ?!?

[ProphetPX777]

hahahaha!

Don't forget about Ajuba! http://wiki.tcl.tk/912 - the once-formerly-new-name of TCL/TK's company website, which was a better name: Scriptics.org, which changed yet again from Ajuba, to the now much-more sensible http://www.tcl.tk/

hahahaha! Where do these OTHER geeks get all these damn stupid names from?????

Re:Mambo Rocks

[randyest]

Please don't assume those two sites are representative of the results of even a moderate amount of effort with mambo / joomla. It's pretty easy to do much better work with very little effort -- see the mambo or joomla sites for some (much less grey) examples.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[randyest]

Nice plug, and much less idiotic than the mambo-ron GGP poster, but what differentiates a "content management system" from a "content management framework?" The feature lists of mambo/joomla and typo3 seem pretty much identical.

Neither seems as capable as, say, metadot (which allows "gizmos" written in actual perl, not PHP, to be dropped in to do anything.) Sorry, no website to plug -- google it.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[chronicon]

Please don't assume those two sites are representative of the results of even a moderate amount of effort with mambo / joomla. It's pretty easy to do much better work with very little effort -- see the mambo or joomla sites for some (much less grey) examples.

I will take that advice. Thanks! I guess the *-Nuke variants have fallen out of favor over mambo & joomla? Or maybe they are very different products altogether?

Re:Mambo Rocks

[randyest]

Oh I wouldn't say either of those are very true. The *nukes are good too. I really don't care much for either, though I've used both to some success. They're similar products, all PHP-based, with similar communities and support/add-ins available.

Mambo/joomla maybe a little easier to set-up and use for newbies, but maybe a tad less flexible. I'm a fan of metadot myself because it's perl instead of PHP and I like the gizmo architecture -- but I'm a masochist that way. :) See the cms comparison tool someone posted in this thread for detailed comparisons of all of them.

Re:Mambo Rocks

[chronicon]

I have noticed a lot of sites using Drupal myself. It seems to have a solid and well supported user-base...

Looney-Tunes Central

[Angst-Angel]

Over at OSM (A.K.A. Looney-Tunes Central) they proudly announced that a global branding company was going to help them find their identity - I bet that company is now scurrying to hide theirs!

Joomla reminds me of so many funny things; a kids card game where if you get 18 clueless developers you cry Joomla! Or a Zulu dance where lithe African men jump into the air with their arms outstretched, but their balls knock together and it makes them cry "Joomla!" (Trans. "Gee my nuts hurt!"). Or a scene from the Lion King where Nala spies young Simba about to step in a pile of Elephant crap and cries "Simba, watch out for that Joomla!"

Re:Joomla!

[Angst-Angel]

"... hey mon me using joomla! for me website mon, mumbo jumbo for me website mon. joomla jumbo for me website mon, me know it's mumbo jumbo but me don't care mon. heeeey mumbo jumbo, heeeey jumbo lie, heeeey mumbo jumbo, heeeey joomla fries..."