The Development Team of Mambo has announced the current development status of the upcoming version 4.5 of Mambo on their website. The main changes have been made in the admin area of Mambo. Also the development team made Mambo XHTML 1.0 compatible. As the new HTML Editor the 2.x version of HTMLArea has been selected.

Theme developers must know, that the team changed the way templates are implemented. The template basis for either Open Source and commercial versions of Mambo will be the same. So templates developers will push the commercial version too, if they want or not. Read on to view the full text.

"Now that we are a few weeks into the development of Mambo Open Source 4.5 here is an brief update on the progress being made.

A massive update to the code base has been taking place to ensure full XHTML 1.0 compatibility. This is the chosen standard we have adopted and more information can be gained from http://www.w3c.org. Also we have taken the move to replace all GIF’s and JPG’s in the core product with PNG’s.

A change in the way templates are implemented has also been 99.9% completed. This is to ensure that people running either open source or future commercial versions of Mambo can benefit from the ever-growing stock. More information on how this will affect existing templates will be posted in the next week or so.

For those that have developed templates already it would be worth going over them to ensure that they are XHTML 1.0 compliant.

A new parameter has been introduced into configuration.php to allow for a default page to be selected. So, for example, if you require to display something on the front-page that is not in Mambo you can set the default page to your own file.

The existing pdf directory found in Mambo installations today has been renamed to media in order to meet the demands of other file types. Improvements have also been made in the backend news syndication.

Many, many improvements have been made in the administrator code, which will lead the way making the integration of custom components so much easier.

Work has just started on providing the ability to assign an image to a category along with combining the existing stories, faq, articles etc. tables into one single table.

Htmlarea has been selected, as the replacement in-built editor for Mambo Open Source and this work is now complete. We have implemented version 2.03 for the time being, although we will be implementing version 3.x at a later stage. Version 2.03 does not generate XHTML 1.0 compliant code."