Great news - Aliro merges with MiaCMS!

We are delighted to announce that the MiaCMS team is joining the Aliro project, a move which is expected to greatly strengthen both.

Anyone who has followed the Mambo family of projects over the last few years is all too familiar with forks. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to forking an open source project; Mambo has actually been forked quite a few times over the years with varying degrees of success. Most of these forks have either faded away or simply gone dormant. However, two very successful projects have emerged from the ashes of their parent and even greatly improved upon the codebase they started with; MiaCMS and Joomla!. Although competition is healthy, too many splits weaken the open source movement, to which both Aliro and MiaCMS are committed.

Today, we are delighted to announce a step in the opposite direction... an open source CMS project merger. The MiaCMS and Aliro projects are joining forces to create a best of breed/next generation CMS.

While we are just announcing this news today, the two teams have already been working together behind the scenes for about 6 months now. Conversations started around creating a compatibility layer for add-ons, but soon evolved into plans for a total merger since we are tackling the same problems and have very similar end goals.

These teams have a history of collaboration. Martin Brampton, founder of Aliro, was a huge contributor and former Core Development Team Leader on the Mambo project several years ago. He wrote much of what became Mambo 4.6, which eventually became the basis for MiaCMS. At Mambo he worked closely with Chad Auld who went on to become Mambo's Project Leader and Core Development Team Leader after Martin's departure, and eventually a co-founder of MiaCMS. Several other current MiaCMS core developers were also on the Mambo team at that time; Neil Thompson and Richard Peter Ong. These folks together with Ozgur Cem Sen, another former Mambo Core Development Team Leader, have decided to reunite. The emerging Aliro platform will serve as the basis for this new era. Much of the work done in MiaCMS since its inception will become part of Aliro, e.g., the YUI implementation, the JavaScript architecture, the WYSIWG editors, a number of add-ons, etc. The name Aliro will be adopted for the combined project.

MiaCMS will remain a standalone project that is fully supported with major bug fixes and security updates for the foreseeable future. The MiaCMS core developers will begin focusing all new development efforts on the Aliro platform after the MiaCMS 4.9 release is out and stable. Further news will be reported as it becomes available. To find out more about the reasons the MiaCMS team give for their decision, please visit the MiaCMS home.

What is Aliro all about?

Aliro is designed to carry forward the state of the art in CMS development. It fully exploits PHP 5 and also requires MySQL 5. It adopts totally object oriented architecture. Efficiency, flexibility, accessibility are key goals. Practically speaking, Aliro comprises three distinct projects:

• A framework for creating a CMS that works as a platform for building add-ons. Key goals are to provide a consistent range of valuable services to add-ons and to be a comfortable and effective development environment. The framework has an administrator interface, but requires add-ons to provide a non-trivial user interface.
• Some basic add-ons that provide sufficient services to turn the Aliro framework into a CMS. There is no obligation to use this particular set of add-ons, and others are encouraged to develop better alternatives, either as part of this project or as independent projects.
• Provision of services for developers working outside the main Aliro project. These include the ability to create and download usable skeletons for new add-ons that kick start the creation process and the hosting of a translation repository that provides for add-ons to be lodged and for translators to create gettext compatible language packs for them. Visit the dedicated developer site.

There is still lots to do, and a variety of different skills needed. Why not join the Aliro project and make a difference to web site development? Contact us to make a start!

What is happening with Aliro right now?

Just released - beta 7 of Aliro 2.0. You can find it in the downloads area. It's available in three versions - the bare Aliro core, a bundle including a range of useful applications, and a package that includes Aliro versions of the old "content" component familiar from MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla. From beta 7 onwards, automatic upgrade is available, which will pull new code from the Aliro upgrade site, bringing any Aliro installation up to date, including deletion of obsolete code. SEF is also somewhat tidied up. Known bugs and progress on their solution can be found at the Aliro Bug Tracker and the growing body of documentation is at the Aliro Documentation Site. There is still plenty more to do, why not join the project?

Why write another CMS?

Are there already enough CMS's in the world? My time as leader of the Mambo development team persuaded me of several things. One was that the general character of the Mambo design was about right. This has been proved by the success first of Mambo, and then of its Joomla! offshoot, which has now outgrown its parent, and the ongoing success of MiaCMS. So Aliro is a framework and add-on project that follows a number of architectural leads taken from the Mambo family.

In 2006, during the creation of Mambo 4.6, the situation was such that a central design policy was to stick closely to the existing interface so as to avoid upsetting existing add-ons. But it was clear that there were many opportunities for taking the concepts forwards, once that constraint was relaxed. And a logical principle was that a major new development would only make sense using PHP 5, rather than being held back by worrying about compatibility with the obsolescent PHP 4. Less critically, it was assumed that MySQL 5 was a reasonable requirement, looking forwards. Since 2006, I don't believe that any CMS has really moved forwards in ways that are important to key constituencies of developers and site administrators. So Aliro attempts to do just that.

A couple of user oriented design principles have always been important for Aliro. In the early stages, people with strong views on accessibility were influential, and Aliro has always aimed to stick closely to accessibility principles and to web design standards. Another was to try very hard to make life pleasant for site administrators and for add-on developers. That involved avoiding gotchas, maximizing efficiency and responsiveness, and simplifying procedures.

One specific outcome of these approaches is the separation of Aliro into a framework that has no permanent user side functionality at all (other than the creation of an almost blank default display). The framework provides services that can be used by add-ons without favoring "core" against "third party". So, for example, if menu services are needed to help the administrator build complex menu entries, the service is provided for all add-ons, not just a specific "core".

A number of things from the Mambo legacy were removed. A prominent example is the "Itemid", an ID number that referred to menu entries. Aliro relies simply on the URI as its own definition, to considerable advantage. If two menu entries point to the same URI, they are considered identical for purposes such as SEF or active menu highlighting. Abandoning Itemid avoids the need for quite a lot of code, and is very much more flexible.

If you dig into Aliro, as I hope you will, many other features will become apparent that are designed to make life easier for everyone involved in its use - developers, administrators, web designers, and (not least!) the people who visit Aliro powered web sites.

Talk or action?

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