Yesterday the Mambo Development Team announced a new roadmap to the upcoming version 5.0. Currently it is planed to released 4 maintainance releases untill the first alpha release of Mambo 5.0 will be available. Here's a short overview:

• 4.5.2: Will come next week. This release will contain some bugfixes, the patTemplate engine (see www.php-tools.de) and some improvements to file permissions.
• 4.5.3: Will come in March. Contains bugfixes, support for Admin languages (finally!) and the ADODB database abstraction layer.
• 4.5.4: Will come in May. Contains bugfixes
• 4.5.5: Will come in June and also bring bugfixes
• 5.0.0 alpha: Planed for mid 2005. Will contain numerous new features such as better rights management, multilanguage content, unlimited folders instead of section/category system and a simple workflow engine.
• 5.0.0 final: Planed for end 2005.
• 5.1.0: Planed for 2006

Detailed informations can be found over at the official Mambo website:

• www.mamboserver.com/menu/Mambo_4.5_and_5.0_Roadmap/

Many people wondered, where I was the last few days. I did get dozens of emails, asking if I got ill or something. No, I am not. To be honest I took a short break from my Mambo related websites. This had two reasons. As you might know, I do live near Cologne in Germany. The city of Cologne is the center of the german carnival, which startet on Thursday and ended today. This was where I spend most of my spare time and even celebrated my birthday, which was on friday.

The rest of the time I spend working on a new Mambo based website. A new project of Konze Webdesign is Wowportal.de. The websites features news and articles in german about the popular Blizzard game World of Warcraft. We set the page up on a separate server and it will be maintained by a team of 4 players.

This small break was very refreshing and my first 'holiday' for about 2 years now. Thanks for your understanding.

Yesterday evening a large security hole was discovered in Mambo. Abusing global variables a possible attacker can get admin access to your website and to your database. The hole is present in all versions of Mambo, the old 4.5 version and the actual version 4.5.1.

Therefore updating is highly recommended. Again this is a major security hole. To do so the development team has released two patch files for both versions. Download the according file from our filebase, unpack it and upload the it to your Mambo root directory. Only one file has to be changed, which is /includes/mambo.php for Mambo 4.5.1 and /classes/mambo.php for the old version.

If you have any questions about the hole or need assistance while updating please use our Security forum over at Mambers.com:

• Security Forum @ Mambers.com

Oliver Bischof has released a new module for Mambo 4.5.1 called ZDNet News. The module allows you to display actual news from the Ziff Davis network. Through the parameters you can easily select the news topic and the amount of news you want to display. You can download the module from our filebase.

Peter Saitz has announced the features for the upcoming version 1.5 of MOS Chat today. Besides some bugfixes, the following new features are planed:

• separated msgs and users list (to improve performance)
• simplified msgs and users list display area
• selection of Name instead Username to display for user list
• plan to add only private msgs view

Currently Peter is looking for testers for the upcoming version. If you want to apply, please visit his website:

• www.mos-chat.com

The mambo-phpShop team has released a new version of their shop component for Mambo recently. Besides some smaller bugs the new version fixes a few problems with PHP5 and with the components installer. It also introduces a new features. Now it is possible to add a product to multiple categories. We have updated out downloads section where you can grab your copy.

VR has released a new template for Mambo 4.5.1 today. VR Corp, which is the name of the template, is a grey colored, fixed width template with a corporate look. You can download the template from our filebase.