Those who have paid attention to me for a while (and I thank both of you) know my opinion of the Content Management System segment, commercial or open source. While nothing is excellent, or even good, for that matter, I did have hopes of one open source project, in particular, growing up to be something useful. And now we’ve got some ,um, interesting (in the chinese curse sense of the word) news on that front.

There’s been a major happening with Mambo, the CMS I’ve used on several projects. In a nutshell, the original owners of the code, Miro, decided to move control of the code into a foundation. Now this in itself isn’t a bad idea, and was, AFAICT supported by at least some members of the dev team.

But that’s where the story gets messy, children. Apparently Miro managed to alienate the entire development team along the way. While I’m tempted to put on my journalist hat and do a lot of “he said, she said” reportage on this, I’m going to restrain myself. I will limit myself to the observation that, as an outsider, it appeared to me that much more than just wrangling over a piece of code was going on. The reaction from all sides shouted out there were other issues, left unsaid, lurking behind it all, and backstage I could hear the sound of axes being ground. Several rumors have surfaced about the reasons behind the scene, and as usual none of them make their targets look especially good.

So what happened? The old Mambo dev team forked the source, and created Joomla. (I wonder how many of the folks who name these things have ever had to stand in a corporate conference room and actually say the name?) So much for the developers. But what of the user base? Where do we go?

Where you will go is up to you. For myself, I’m going to keep an eye on Mambo as it goes forward (if it goes forward) but I can’t lose sight of the reason I was actually using Mambo in the first place. From the discussions with some developers that grew out of the OSCMS discussion that Jeff Veen started, I think the road map they set out for Mambo will result in something I can really use. The now-Joomla team appears to remain committed to this map, while I have no idea yet what the new Mambo team will do. So I don’t see I have a choice. A brand name, or a product? It’s nicest to have both, I admit, but when I can’t, I have to go with the product. It’s a no-brainer.

Hence I’ve started to examine just what it’ll take to bring up Joomla on all of my current Mambo sites. I’ve also started to examine all the changes I’ve made to the code, to see what bits and pieces will port easily to Joomla, and which ones I’ll have to leave behind, and what that might mean. The conversion isn’t a step I’ll take lightly. Neither name is especially attractive, but I know I have clients who’ll panic at the thought of changing. Mambo therefore has a limited window of opportunity to keep in my game, at least for existing sites.

For new sites, I’m going to build in Joomla, if I can, because there, right now, is where I’m betting the future lies. It would be idiotic to commit to one product or one development team for eternity, and while my momma may have raised a fool, she didn’t raise an idiot. But I have to pick the best choice I can today, and so I have.