Personal Information

Name: Damian Caynes
Nickname: idigital (mambers,mamboforge, official forums-banned twice), Dr. Do-Lil (official forums-banned), BE-Mambo (official forums)
Residence: Queensland, Australia
Nationality: Australian
Age: 31
Job: Full time Mambo hacker
URL: www.allmambo.com

Mambo and You

When Did you get in Contact with Mambo?
After months of searching and evaluating, I chose Mambo back in March because of it's ease of use in templating and development and also what I percieved at the time as the lack of drama in this community.

I was amazed by both the power of Mambo and its evolution. I was shocked by the attitudes of some in the community and the subsequent melodrama that has eventuated.

It's been the best and worst of both worlds for all involved, I'm sure, although I believe that we can all move forward from these eruptuions to greater things. It's all good.

What is your current role in the Mambo community?
Well, I'm a developer/designer and I spend more time tinkering with Mambo on my localhost than developing live sites. That has begun to change recently, I'm working on a major redevelopment of a gaming site at the moment which is exciting.

Apart from a forum addiction I'm trying to shake, I have been hacking away at Mambo quite a bit in the months since I've started using it. When the backend templating features were still emerging, I hacked together the Javabean Admin template as a demonstration of what would be possible. In the past month that has had over two thousand downloads, and I know has been altered for at least one production site.

I've found that with it's very open model, Mambo is ideal for anyone who wants to get into php and mysql development as well as design and content management. In some ways it is the ultimate learning tool for these technologies, and everyone can make it grow into a mature platform.

I'm just one of those mambers getting to know Mambo and php as I go along. We're all hackers at heart.

Do you have any Mambo projects beside the above?
Too many. I have several projects registered on MamboForge, including working on Backend Templates with X-F4CT0R (Arnes Hadzic) and the Backend Elements (CMTs) project. I'm planning release of an administrator CMT development resource, Backenders, when 4.5.1 goes stable and there will be 4.5.1 backend components, modules and templates released as well as tutorials and hacks.

I've put together a javascript DOM windowed administrator, Mambo Desktop, that will get finished at some point. It's a different way of accessing the backend, with the feel of windows within your browser, although it could end up a bit of a novelty.

Another concept I'm playing with is packaging CMTs in various ways, administrator templating and customisation has opened up a new world for Mambo developers.

I'm also a team member over at allmambo.com, and I'm happy to help out or contribute to any worthwhile project. That takes up most of my waking hours.

Of course, there are also the secret projects, but they are secret! ;)

What are you doing, when you are not working for Mambo?
Sleeping.

About Mambo

What is Mambo's biggest advantage against other CMS?
Ease of development and the increasingly customisable "core" features. Even moreso are the contributions made by the community, their CMTs and support sites such as mambohut, corephp, mambosolutions, allmambo, mamboportal and mambers. It must be said that mamboforge is a very active resource as well, allowing us all to get the feel of managing small projects, and  the official tech support forums are a great place for the latest development news.

And the biggest disadvantage?
The drama that we can all get caught up in at times. In the end, these disputes can even be a good thing, allowing us all to truly voice our opinions. Being banned from the official forums without warning because someone is in a bad mood, that's also a disadvantage for me. Such is life in an online community.

Also the closed door development mentality of Mambo Project Management seems to stunt the development process of third parties creating new CMTs, we all really need to know where Mambo is going at all times. A roadmap is a good step, hopefully at some point we'll be able to see where that road leads. Without that full knowledge, it's hard for developers to know whether to stick with the old or pioneer the new.

Where do you see Mambo in the future?
I see it becoming the #1 CMS in the world and then, honestly, I see the core adopting a similar business model to other successful open source projects with the big money, I think it's unavoidable.

I also think that we'll see other branches of Mambo, projects using the Mambo "engine" to power their web applications. We know Mambo as a CMS, in the future it will probably become more of a web application framework than simply content management.

Your final word to the community?
Well, my final word would be goodbye. But this isn't my final word.