Today Phil Taylor declared his retreat from the Mambo Development Team. Phil, who already thought about his retreat a longer time, posted a small announcement on his personal website:

"Well all good things have to come to an end...  I write this small announcement to let everyone know that I have just submitted my written resignation from the Mambo core development team.

I know this decision will come to a shock to some, an excitement to others, and indifference to the majority but the decision that has been taken has been thought over for a long period of time and was probably slightly overdue."

Besides his work in the core team, Phil Taylor will stay with Mambo. He will continue to support Mambo and the community with his knowledge and with high quality developments. The full announcement can be found here:

• www.phil-taylor.com/blog/Mambo_Dev_blog/

Robert Prince has coded a new searchbot for Mambo 4.5.1 today. His Zoom Searchbot can search through the Zoom image gallery component. As a special feature the bot supports the automatic display of thumbnail images as search result. You can download the searchbot from our filebase.

Alex Sancho has ported the Kubrick template from Michael Heilemann to Mambo today. The design is a bright white, fixed width template with a large blue header. Kubrick also has nice shadow effects and comes with a build in css menu.

The template was dedicated to the well known director Stanley Kubrick, who made such popular films like 2001 - Space Odyssey or Clockwerk Orange. You can get the template from our downloads section here at Mamboportal.com.

Adrian Gray has updated his Mos Petition component to Mambo 4.5.1 today. The component, which is based on AkoBook, allows your users to submit petition to your website. The new version does not come with new features, but was only made ready for 451. It can be downloaded from our filebase.

Currently Adrian wants to improve MosPetiton further and he is looking for help. He is searching for people to help with translation and for coders, who could help him a little bit. You can contact Adrian on the MosPetiton project page on MamboForge:

• www.mamboforge.net/projects/mospetition

Michael Morris, webmaster of Mambohut.com, has opened up a new Mambo website today. MamboDemo.com offers flash tutorials about many common Mambo tasks. Currently there are 17 tutorials available, which can be viewed online only.

Users interested in downloading the tutorials can buy the complete package for 50 USD. MamboDemo.com even offers companies to get branded versions of the tutorials. You find the new Mambo website over here:

• www.mambodemo.com

Antonio Membiela has released new template for Mambo 4.5.1 today. MV Newspaper, which is the name of the template is a bright, fixed width template which comes with 3 different layouts. The template has a build in detection and changes the layout depending on which site you are viewing at the moment.

Sadly this trigger is hardcoded and does not make use of the Mambo assign function. The template also has very large, not optimized images, which produces a high traffic and long loading times. MV Newspaper has been added to the downloads section, where you can get it.

Since about 10 days I discovered email problems with the webserver. I did not really thought about it due to the christmas holidays, but with the start of MamboShop.com suddenly many customers complained about not getting their products send. I therefore talked with my webhoster 1&1 yesterday and today. They checked it and could not find any problems, although in fact all of my websites (which use Mambo, vBulletin, X-Cart, phpMyFAQ, ...) are unable to send out emails through the php mail() function. 1&1 says, it must have something to do with the script settings and declines any connection with the update to php 4.3.10 two weeks ago.

As it seems that 1&1 is not interested to solve the problem I have no other chance as to change the hoster this month. I hereby apologize for the troubles you might had with my websites and also apologize for the problems which will come due to the sudden hoster change. I will try to find a new hoster this week and start the move of the first domains next week. Let me clearly state that I from now on can not recommend 1&1 or any other companies of United-Internet.com anymore!