Aliro

Aliro is designed to carry forward the state of the art in CMS development. It fully exploits PHP 5 and also requires MySQL 5, and 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 extensions. Key goals are to provide a consistent range of valuable services to extensions and to be a comfortable and effective development environment. The framework has an administrator interface, but requires extensions to provide a non-trivial user interface.
• Some basic extensions that provide sufficient services to turn the Aliro framework into a CMS. There is no obligation to use this particular set of extensions, 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 extensions that kick start the creation process and the hosting of a translation repository that provides for extensions 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!

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. So Aliro is a framework and extension 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 extensions. 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 extension 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 extensions 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 extensions, 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?

You can see some performance indicators at the bottom left of your screen. The figures will vary - refresh the page and you may see a difference. This reflects the effective use of cache. If you arrive at the site when the cache is old, your first page will require more resources than subsequent pages. If the site is busy, all your pages should be very low on resources. When a lot of memory is used, this is caused by the highly sophisticated HTML purification that is used (courtesy of the HTML Purifier project). And please check out our standards by submitting the site to the W3C validator - and report back any problems!