After severing my ties to Joomla! a few weeks back, I was approached by representatives of the Mambo development team and asked if I would assist them in establishing a new project site independent from their corporate sponsor. I agreed to help out and have also contributed my Mambo documentation wiki to the new initiative. Over the next few months, the Mambo project will be relocating to its new home and will eventually be completely independent.
Announcement of the launch of Mambo Guru
From the Mambo Guru site: http://mamboguru.comBy the community, for the community, and free of corporate involvement, we are proud to announce the launch of a group of websites dedicated to helping Mambo users get more out of their use of the Mambo CMS.
Mambo Guru – for support, information, and documentation – aims to change the landscape for open source tools for web site building.
Mambo Guru has been founded by a small group of people who firmly believe that the community of Mambo users need and deserve active web sites that are dedicated to their interests, and free of pressure from corporate interests. The Mambo Guru sites complement and extend the services presently provided by the Mambo Foundation.
At a more practical level, Mambo Guru is making a big effort to implement features that have long been desired. In particular, a Wiki is a sound platform for collaborative development of solid documentation for Mambo. You can find the Online Manual for Mambo at http://wiki.mamboguru.com
The Mambo Guru forum is primarily a medium for self help by Mambo users. No individual knows all the answers to Mambo questions, but collectively we can help each other to solve many problems. The founders will actively support the Mambo Guru forum, which can be found at http://forum.mamboguru.com.
For a mixture of entertainment and information, Mambo Guru has established a blog site, starting with a blog by Counterpoint, current leader of the Mambo development team. The blog is, not surprisingly, at http://blog.mamboguru.com. It will include discussion of ideas for the future direction of content management.
Anchoring these sites is http://www.mamboguru.com which will be a focal point for news about Mambo, firmly established guidance in the form of FAQ, file downloads and general Mambo related documents.
The founders of Mambo Guru are:
- Martin Brampton aka Counterpoint, current leader of the Mambo Foundation development team
- David Rabinowitz aka Hazman, current leader of the Moderation team for the Mambo Foundation
- Lynne Pope aka Elpie, long-time contributor to Mambo and Joomla!, and expert on presentation side development
- Carlos Souza aka csouza, core development team member of Mambo
The founders believe that there is nothing wrong with corporate involvement in Mambo. However, they do believe that the heart of Mambo is the group of volunteers who have built the software, assisted people with its implementation and carried out a range of other tasks. Mambo Guru is therefore committed to the principle that corporate involvement should be at arm's length, and its value should be assessed in relation to the interests of the Mambo community at large.
UPDATE:
Shortly after I completed the work in designing and setting up the Mamboguru site I learned that things were not what they seemed to be. Martin Brampton, who was the lead developer of Mambo at that time, resigned shortly thereafter. It seems the project had never intended to move to the site and had, in fact, been preparing to move to its own site and servers, independent from mamboserver.com. Carlos and I both felt misled and subsequently I withdrew my support for the mamboguru efforts.
Note:A further update can be found in this post.
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