Today our Mambo forum community over at Mambers.com has reached 50,000 posts. These amount has been reached in less than 6 month. This makes Mambers.com the fastest growing Mambo forum with about 280 new posts a day. Time to say thanks to the more than 7,000 registered users and to the about 20,000 daily visitors. If you still do not have an account at Mambers.com, we really can't help you anymore... ;-)

• www.mambers.com

I do get many mails in the last weeks asking for AkoComment, AkoBook or some of my other components and modules for Mambo 4.5.1. All of them will be converted to Mambo 4.5.1 step by step. But as my day also only has 24 hours, this may take a few month.

Most of my time I have to contribute to my Mambo company over at www.konze.de as this is my bread and butter. If you want me to use more time on my free CMT's, you should use the Donate button more often. I have released 13 free templates 2 days ago. The result so far: 1,851 downloads - 1 donation.

I hope you can understand me and everyone who knows me better, does know that I am no greedy person, but I have to take care that I can pay my bills at the end of the month in first place. Consider this, before you asking me again for this or that component. Thanks.

Since today 750 Mambo related and Mambo based websites are listed at Mamble.com. Thanks to everyone who submitted his websites.

With more than 60,000 click-throughs so far it currently is the most important Mambo weblinks resource. So it would be great, if you also could submit your website to Mamble.com.

Many people are currently using our large 'Commercial' section to find a Mambo solution provider. So every commercial developer, designer or Mambo hoster should make sure, he is listed there. Just use the 'Add Link' button at the botto of each category.

• www.mamble.com

Since last night hack I have recoded several parts of the ReMOSitory component and made it safe now. I also cleaned up the design of the detail page and started to implement SEF support into ReMOSitory. If everything is finished, I will release this modified version of ReMOSitory to the community. The filebase is back online now, so happy downloading again.

Today a guy called kh0aimi ( This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it , www.xfrog.org) hacked Mamboportal.com and managed to insert a user through sql injection using the ReMOSitory component. Therefore I sadly have to take down the complete filebase for now. The hacker did not contacted me personally after finding the security hole, but published it on another website to become famous. This stupid behavior leed to 5 hacks by other people abusing his information this morning.

Currently I'm working with high pressure to fix the hole. Untill then, everybody should take down their ReMOSitory filebase immediately as everyone can gain admin access easily! Detailed informations about the hack can be found at the following website:

• www.securitytracker.com/alerts/2004/Sep/1011356.html

Update: I managed to find the hole and fixed it. I'm currently taking a look at the whole ReMOSitory code to avoid such security issues in the future. The filebase will be online again in a few hours. I also wrote a small patch file for your ReMOSitory filebase. You can download it here:

• ReMOSitory Security Patch

The Helping Hand Initiative is over now. The aim was to reducde to amount of unanswered threads over at Mambers.com. During the last 7 days many people fought against the growing number of threads which staid unanswered and helped their fellow Mambers.

You could reduce the amount from 2,140 to 1,985, which is a total of 155 threads down. This way I could donate 15.5 US Dollar to the Mambo project today. I know this is not much, but be sure we will do this again soon. Many thanks for your help and I really hope you will still help others over at Mambers.com.

The german news- and fileportal Mamboport.de has joined the community forums of Mambers.com today. Mamboport webmaster Wolfi closed down their own forums to fully concentrate on news and the large filebase of the growing german Mambo website.

Over at the Mambers.com forums the team now has a hosted forum and works together with the german section modteam. Mambers.com, which is currently visited by 20,000 users from many countries daily, welcomes the new website.

• www.mamboport.de
• German Community @ Mambers.com

Our spanish sistersite Mambohispano.org has been redesigned recently and has the new design online since today. Webmaster Funmaking:

"Now we have a colorfull template with css compliant, without tables, with a random header and colored columns. 55thinking and YTW have redesigned the website for me."

The new design looks very stylish and can be seen at their website:

• www.mambohispano.org

The very active german Mambo community is currently organizing the world largest Mambo real life event. The 'Mamboday' will be held in Germany's Rhineland early 2005. Several public discussions will be held and there will be open workshops and live tutorials.

Furthermore several well known people of the national and international Mambo community will be there for interviews. The organizing team has announced the Mamboday 2005 today and opened up a forum at Mambers.com for discussion, questions and ideas about the Mamboday 2005. You can find it in the german section of Mambers.com:

• Mamboday 2005 @ Mambers.com

We do currently have many postings over at Mambers.com, which stay unanswered. This morning we exactly had 2140 unanswered posts. So I decided to start the 'Helping Hand Initiative'. We kindly ask you to help your fellow Mamber and answer some of the posts made by Mambo newbies. This will help others to better understand Mambo and to feel welcomed in the community.

But the most exciting fact is, that we will pay for your help. Konze Webdesign will donate 10 Cents for every answered post to the Mambo project. But please note, that we only can accept real answers and no dummy postings. Our Moderators will delete unqualified answeres like 'I don't know either' or 'Mary had a little lamb...' withour further notice.

The Helping Hands Initiative will last for 7 days untill September 15th. Afterwards we will count all unanswered threads again and will donate the difference to the Mambo project. The last 500 unanswered threads can be found at Mambers.com's top menu throught 'View Posts->Unanswered Threads' or by following this link:

• Unanswered Threads

Mambohut.com has started a Mambo wallpaper competition today. If you want to take part, you have to send in your submission in at least 1024x768 as a JPEG untill September 16th. Detailed informations and the list of prizes can be found over at Mambohut:

• MamboHUT Wallpaper Competition

During the last few days I redesigned our forum community Mambers.com. The website now has a fresh, green and golden colored look. We do invite everybody to take a look at the new design and maybe join into the discussions.

Since we started Mambers.com in April this year, more than 6,000 Mambers registered and created the huge amount of more than 42,000 postings. We are hosting 9 international communities including the largest german and the largest italian forum communities at Mambers.com. Thanks to the people, who made all this possible!

And we will go even further with Mambers.com. A security forum will be started soon, which will be moderated by Jascha, author of the Mambo security advisory. Also two new international communities will follow untill the end of this year. So I hope to see you over there. Register today and join into the discussions over at

• www.mambers.com

Today me and many other developers got a public apology from the german gaming clan Ocrana. Ocrana set up a new website a month ago based on Mambo and sadly removed all powered by links and copyrights from their website.

Marcel Kisch from Ocrana added a listing of the components they use to a FAQ section on their website today with links to the original authors. He also promised to send out some donations to support the developers and the Open Source idea.

I recently came accross the website of the german gaming clan Ocrana. While I first was happy to see they use Mambo, I suddenly realised, they removed all copyrights and powered by links. Not only the ones from Mambo, but also from every component they are using.

And they use a lot: AkoLegal, ReMOSitory, LeagueManager, phpBB4Mambo, Zoom Gallery and some additional modules. All without any hints or copyrights from the original authors. Not nice, but ok? It get's even worse!

On their website they proudly talk about "Ocrana Webpage v1.0". In the forums the do get many positive response from their users (at least Mambo again proves to be the best cms), but they do not point a single user to Mambo.

Personally I am sick of such webmasters, who only have learned to take and not to give. It makes me sad, that a gaming clan, which is sponsored by ATI and by Plantronics, does not donate a single cent back to the original authors. Removing the copyrights and powered by everywhere, makes it even worse. I wonder, what their sponsors would say.

Although they might win on the electronic battlefield, they are loosers in real life. Without donations or users, which come to our websites and click banners, we open source authors wouldn't be able to give so much as we do. Just my 2 cent...

• www.ocrana.com

I'm happy to announce that Mambo's number one bot page Mambots.com has joined our Mambers.com forum community project today. Webmaster Thomas Kahl has taken over the moderation of the newly opened up Mambots forum.

With the upcoming version 4.5.1 Mambots will play a more important role. The new RC1 will already come with a bot manager and a bot XML installer. So we are more than happy to have such a strong partner for the Mambots. We all hope to see you posting in our new Mambots forum soon:

• Mambots forum @ Mambers.com
• www.mambots.com

FYI we turned off the email validaten during the registration process today. Many people have reported problems with Mambo not sending out emails or users not receiving them. So we will leave this off untill we do upgrade to 4.5.1.

Mamboportal.com currently has about 45,000 registered users and still many are double entries. We even had a user who tried to register 14 times! We will clean up this user database before we will move to 4.5.1 and remove every double entry.

Steven Pignataro, webmaster of CorePHP.com and popular mamber of our community, went down to Florida for a vacation a week ago. During this time he was hit by the hurricane Charley and barely survived the storm. He wrote an article about his survival over at his website. It is an unbelieveable story, so be sure to check it:

• www.corephp.com

The Mambers.com project ist one of the most successfull Mambo websites this year. It started in April and untill now already 40,000 posts were made by our visitors. Mambers.com was ment to bring the community together in one place and today we continue in our effort to do so.

We are proud to announce the opening of the portuguese community over at Mambers.com. The moderation has been taken over by our community Mamber Fabio. He also is the webmaster of Brasil's No. 1 Mambo website Mambobrasil.org. We hope to see you over at our new portuguese community soon.

• Portuguese Community @ Mambers.com
• Mambobrasil.org

Today the official website has been updated to Mambo 4.5.1. With this update the design of Mamboserver.com has been changed to a bright, very professional look. The side now also makes use of the new multiple menu feature of Mambo 4.5.1.

The professional design show very clearly the aim of Mambo. We are no small, experimental CMS anymore. We have passed the Nukes now and go for the leadership hunt. Those guys at typo3 now better watch out!

Sadly only, that Mamboserver.com still does not link back to major community websites like Mamboportal.com, Mambohut.com or Corephp.com. And where would Mambo be without those websites...

Today we opened up a separate download section for the upcoming version 4.5.1 of Mambo. To get it filled with nice files, we kindly ask everyone to submit your 4.5.1 files to us. Some people asked me, if current CMT's are compatible with he new version, therefore we compiled a small list, what will run and what needs to be updated:

• Components: All current components will run with 4.5.1. However developers should update to some newer routines (new tab system, yes/no radio boxes, etc.)
• Modules: Yes and no! Modules, which are not using parameters will run on 4.5.1 without any problem. But modules which use parameters have to be updated to the new parameter system.
• Templates: All actual template will run with Mambo 4.5.1. But as Mambo 4.5.1 supports a lot more module positions, comes with some new stylesheets and also not lets you change the pathway arrow, you might want to think about an update.
• Languages: All languages will run with 4.5.1. But some small texts have been changed and a few have been added. There updating your language file is recommended.
• Mambots: All mambots will also run with 4.5.1. But significant changes have been made to the way Mambots work. 4.5.1 will be backwards compatible, but it also will be the last version supporting the old format. Updating therefore is recommended.

Details on updating your files to Mmabo 4.5.1 can be found inside the 'Developers Manual', which can be downloaded from the new 4.5.1 section.