One month has passed since our last preview on a CVS version of Mambo 4.6. Many of you might ask yourself, if and how the development continued. We have taken a closer look at the current state of development and downloaded the latest CVS release today. Read on to see what we have found out.

The Quicklinks
If you go into Mambo's 4.6 admin backend you will be welcomed by a new Quicklinks screen. This screen gives you direct access to the most important administrative functions. It looks similar to the well known Postnuke administration and contains mainly the same links than the 'Site' menu. Although this is a nice idea, it would be more usefull to get an overview over administrative tasks like unpublished items, new submitted items, new users, etc.

It also links back to the internet and grabs the latest news from Mosforge.net. This is a really usefull feature for the welcome screen, but it should be configureable. Most people who do use Mambo don't have a Mambo related website. Think about how nice it would be if you could add a few RSS feeds here having your website's topic?

The Elements Manager
All Components, Modules, Templates, Languages and Plugins (former Mambots) are handled within the new Elements Manager. Since or last preview this probably most important adminstration tool did get even worse. 58 Elements are listed in the base version of Mambo already. It could easily be twice as much on a live site.

Although you have different possiblities to filter the table, the whole table became a little bit too technical. Maybe the Dev Team should think about a new way to present this large amount of information. A tree menu system maybe can serve the Admin more than the common Mambo table.

The Language Manager
Sadly the language Manager still did not work on our test server (a common, up2date WAMP system). So we can not tell you much about the new features. Probably the most important is the possibility to also translate the whole administration backend of Mambo. This is an important step ahead and was badly missed at 4.5.

From the technical point of the speed and the error handling was improved inside 4.6 with the new OOP based handling of language packs. So thumbs up for this features, if it is running fine in the final version.

The usability issue
In our last preview we found out that Mambo's usability has droped since 4.5. The Development Team already has changed some things like the upper button bar, which is now much more readably than in our preview one months ago. But there is still a lot work to do to at least equal Mambo 4.5 in this point.

The JSCook Dropdown Menu is still very hard to handle. During our test it happened multiple times, that we clicked the wrong menu. The integrated RTE editor still has no support for the Mambo plugin tags. You have multiple colored reorder buttons and of course the already talked about Elements Manager.

Weblinks and Newsflash - gone
Yes, both components have been removed. The functionality has been taken over by the content items. You now can add one link to a content item. This way the development team has handled a weblinks section and it's very unsatisfying solution.

You can not maintain large weblinks directories this way. From the weblinks point of view this is a step backwards. Hopefully a developer will pick up this ball and start to code a nice weblinks solution.

But the idea of adding links to content items is not bad in general. It would be a great feature to add related links, either internal or external to content items like news for example. But this should not be limited to only 1 link! A solution similar to the images with the mosimage bot command would be a unique feature.

Another component, which is gone is the newsflash. The DevTeam has brought together the two news systems inside Mambo 4.5 into one. Using a specially configured module you can easily decide which news items should also be displayed in the newsflash. Someone has thought and he did well!

The new userfields
Finally the Developement Team made it and heard the request of many. They have added a bunch of new userfields to Mambo's core user handling. All in all 15 new userfields, which include address informations and pagers have found their way into Mambo.

The integration is very basic yet and only allows these 15 fields, but this is definitely the right direction. Now 3rd party developers have a good base for their user handling. This should boost upcoming 4.6 elements!

Actual Stability and Release Date
Although some of you might wish me to hell for talking about stability in CVS version, I nevertheless will do. Today's CVS release is still buggy! Besides the Language Manager issue, the Global Checkin does not work, you can still rename module positions to zero charaktes names and some more bugs.

Mambo 4.6 CVS still looks like the Developement Team is working hard on it. Many things are still unfinished and so I do not await a beta release soon. Only when all the new features are integrated well and working stable, the Dev Team will release a beta version. This could be somewhere at the end of July. So a final version could be available in August or September.

Please note: This CVS preview does not represent the final version of Mambo 4.6 in any kind. The preview was written to show where we are at the moment.

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