Introduction
We downloaded the latest CVS version dated May 30th from the Sourceforge.net CVS system today and used it for this preview. If you want to know, how you can do that, please visit Mambers.com, where a detailed description can be found in the forums. Please note, that a CVS release is not final and many things still can, and hopefully will, be changed by the developers. So this preview only shows you the current state of the development and this is exactly our intention.

The new look & feel
Mambo 4.6 comes with a new backend design. More Mambo-orange has been added to the whole backend. As you can see in the following pictures it is used at many places. Although it gives Mambo a more typical touch, a design is a completely subjective thing, everyone has to decide for himself, if he/she likes it or not.

The switching table colors have been removed from the backend and have been replaced by a MouseOver highlightning. Personally I liked this effect in phpmyAdmin already and think it's usefull to have it in Mambo too. Only 3rd party developers will of course have some more work to do, while converted their old switching tables to the new MouseOver effect.

The Dropdown Menu
First the good news: The dropdown menu elements themselves have been cleaned up in 4.6 as the new Element Manager now has taken over several jobs from other menus (such as Install Component, Install Module). But sadly the design of the tested CVS version looks pretty bad. All menu elements are too tight together, so it easily could happen, that you hit the wrong entry. Also the dark blue highlightning under the black text is hard to read as the contrast is not high enough. The old Mambo 4.5 menu (bottom menu) looks more cleaned up and is more readable.

The Toolbar
Mambo's toolbar has been redesigned too. All the nice icons from Foood.net have been removed and are now replace by simple grey bar image. And again this is not only a subjective issue. With the removal of the icons, 3rd party developers have to check their custom toolbars for references to the old icon files. And sadly the statement about the bad readable menu also appears to the toolbar. It is completely colored in a bright grey, which makes it very hard to read the toolbar items. And without the well known items it will be even harder to orientate.

The Elements Manager
One of the most exiting new features in Mambo 4.6 is the new XML installer of Mambo and corresponding Elements Manager. Mambo 4.6 summarizes all Component's, Module's, Template's, Language's and the Mosbot's as Elements. Elements are installed and maintained using the Element Manager. In the current CVS release the layot was an unlucky one. The 'Install' and 'Install from directory' boxes have been moved from the bottom of the old installer screens to the right. This busts the layout in 800x600 screen resultion.

The actual Element Manager gives you a lot possibilities, but it also let's you do strange things. As you can see we managed to change the Poll core component into a template. Although it does not seem to have any effect on the function of the component, it still could confuse the users.

The Template Manager
One of the highlights of Mambo 4.6 is the Template Manager. It let's you assign certain templates to certain pages, which is definitely an amazing feature. The whole Templates Manager looks much better and cleaner than the current Elements Manager. A second usefull feature of the Template Manager is the instant preview function. Just point your mouse over a template's name and you will be presented the thumbnail of the template.

Module Positions
With Mambo 4.6 you can set up your own module positions very easy using the new Module Positions screen. Sadly you can not delete them after you set them up once in the actual CVS release. To change a module postions name you can use a new quick change option. Just point your mouse over the positions name and you will be presented a small form to change the name. Although this is a nice idea, it breaks with the common way to edit in Mambo using the toolbar. To keep Mambo simple the whole system should only use one way of editing a name.

Finally we managed to save a zero character module position, as you can see. Even old 'core' positions can be edited. This will make it hard for designers to find a standard, as they only can hope a user hasn't edited the 'core' positions name.

Content Item Editing
A new 'feature', which has been announced recently for Mambo 4.6 is the {mosreadon} bot command. It is used as a divider between the introduction of a text and the main part. If this feature is really needed, is a very subjective view. Devlopers again have to check their code for database accesses to old, divided textfields and they have to add a bot parser to their development. Existing, divided content items luckily will be converted automatically using a mysql script. In fact the small botcommand looks a little lost on a large text screen and you're sometimes not sure, where the intro text stops.

But the main problem should be to enter the botcommand. In the new standard editor RTE still no Mambo specific commands have been added. So you have to type everything by hand at the moment. And no other editor is was available with this CVS release, as HtmlArea2 has been removed from Mambo.

The Rabbit's Hole
Of course Mamboportal.com went into the Rabbit's Hole and also took a look at the code structure of Mambo 4.6 itself. And this time we really liked what we saw. Mambo's code is much cleaner now due to the phpDocumentor implementation. And it is not only well documented, the developers also added more function's which will it make even simpler to code your own Elements for Mambo 4.6.

Conclusion
The actual CVS release from May 30th of Mambo 4.6 is far from being finished. Too many things still have to be reworked to make Mambo 4.6 a pleasure. At the moment whole parts of the system couldn't even be tested as they did not work completely. The Global configuration gave us a Fatal Error as well as the Language Manager, which we really liked to test to see the new backend translation feature.

Although the Development Team definitely is on the right way with Mambo 4.6, it looks like they have missed a few steps. The usability is worse than in Mambo 4.5 and the system still has some logical errors (renaming to zero character names). But with the already very powerfull code backbone, it luckily only is a question of time.

Release Date
As you might know Mamboportal.com is only a fan site and therefore can not tell you any official release dates. Personally I do not await a public beta version during the next two weeks, which will probably move a final version of Mambo 4.6 to the end of june or even early july.

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