On Saturday, 28th of May 2005 the Mamboday 2005 was held in Bonn, Germany. What began as a vision of a few people from the german Mambers.com subforums a year ago finally became reality this weekend. About 200 visitors followed the interesting lectures and workshops in three luckily well climated conference rooms. I was one of the speakers there and made a workshop about component development. This is my report from the largest Mambo event in the world.

The official beginning was sheduled for 10am but as one of the organisers and speakers I arrived at 9am in Bonn. The location was the Gustav Heinemann House, which is a larger conference center especially focussing on handicapped visitors. We rented the whole first floor for the event containing one larger hall for 200 people and two smaller rooms for 60 and 30 visitors.

Untill 10am many, many people arrived at the location and the hall was well filled when Robert Deutz, main organizer and chairman of the german Mambo eV, officially opened up the event. He handed over the microphone to Alex Kempkens, only german member of the core team. Alex gave us a detailed overview where Mambo is standing now and how the development will continue in the future. Very interesting was the fact, that the core team decided to build up two Mambo versions for the near future. A 4.5.x based branch will aim the PHP4 users, while a completely newly programmed 5.0 branch will only run with PHP5. The 4.5.x branch will continue to add more features and after the upcoming 4.5.3 release Alex told us, the core team currently plan to release a 4.6 and maybe a 4.7 version of Mambo.

The 5.0 branch will orientate itself on enterprise content management systems. It will be a more professional version with much more features, but a loss of simplicity. An alpha released was announced for end 2005/beginning 2006. During a discussion at the end of the Mamboday we were informed about the fact, that the core team currently is discussing about a new license for Mambo 5.0, as it will have a completely new codebase. Core team member Brian Teeman told us, that it probably will be an open source license modell, which will be more free than GPL.

After Alex Kempkens finished his overview over the Mambo roadmap, the official program started with many lectures and workshops in all 3 rooms. The first highlight was Mark Hinze's workshop about template development. Mark, who recently won the Mambohut.com template contest, started with the very basics of template development, explained the visitors how to create professional, tableless layouts and how to implement them into Mambo. Finally he shared some of his tricks with the community, which were even interesting for the experts.

At the same time Thomas Kahl (aka zorkhh), who did many middle and large sized Mambo projects in Europe, published some very interesting case studies about projects done with Mambo. He explained how much can be done with Mambo, but also pointed his finger in some old wounds like the bad user handling. Many larger projects he did wouldn't be possible without some core hacks. At the end of this lecture Marcel Kisch, head of IT at german e-sports clan Ocrana.ati, explained how they ported their large website to Mambo in only 6 weeks from scratch. For their website, which is visited by 90,000 people monthly, they use a combination of Mambo and the phpBB solution by Adam von Dongen.

At about 11:45am the next lectures started. In the large hall developer Soeren Eberhardt hold a lecture about his well known and widely used shop system PHP-Shop. He explained in detail how to install and configure one of the largest components available for Mambo at the moment. It was very interesting to see, which things can be covered by this powerfull shop. The CSS workshop, which probably also was one of the highlights, sadly had to be removed from the program list two days before the Mamboday as lecturer Christian Hent canceled it for personal reasons. The organizers tried to compensate this loss in seting up a CSS Corner, where designer Angie Radtke and myself were available for an open smalltalk about CSS later.

Talking about Angie we all must admit, that her lecture about barrier-free websites was the most underestimated lecture. Both times the room was crowded with people, some even sitting at the floor or standing in the door. She talked about the problems for handicapped people with badly designed websites. Angie complaint about the many hardcoded HTML Tags still burried deep inside Mambo's core, which make it very hard to be competitive at the market. For most government and organisation websites it's knock out critera if the CMS is not possible to show the website without barriers for anyone.

After this second part it was time for lunch. Also the lunch was not included into the entrance fee many people made use of this moderate offer. During the lunch many people used this short break for intensive discussions about Mambo and found many interesting contacts. After the lunch the organizer made drew some lots where people could win a managed server for 1 year and some book prices. Afterwards the workshops continued at about 2pm.

Core Member Alex Kempkens hold a workshop about his multilanguage content component Mambelfish. He explained how to install and configure the fish. In the progress of implementing the Mambelfish component to the core, he announced that upcoming version will not need core hacks anymore.

At about 3pm Antonio Cambule took over the large hall from Alex. He made a workshop about the administration backend of Mambo. This was especially interesting for Mambo newbies and therefore the hall was very well visited. While most users were impressed by the backend, some 'features' confused people, like the suddenly disappering menu system or the bunch of paramters, when creating new content. Robert Deutz, author of a german Mambo book, made a workshop about the development of Mambots and modules, which was especially helpfull for upcoming Mambo developers.

During this time Angie Radkte and myself were availabe in the CSS corner. We discussed about CSS and could give away some tricks to the interested. But our main topic was the fact that you still have to change core code if you want things to look perfect. People complaint about the many exception designers still have to deal with. We closed the CSS corner with the wish that CSS optimization would have more weight in the core teams plans.

From 4pm to 4:30pm no workshops were held. This small break best could be described as Tripple-C time: community, coffe and cookies. Many Mambers from the large german community at Mambers.com used this time to meet themselves in real life. While most visitors came from Germany, I also spoke with people from Austria, the Netherlands and Swiss.

At about 4:30pm and 5:45pm I made a workshop about the development of components. I started it from the beginning in explaining a comnponente. During the workshop I explained the XML Installer, pointed the visitors to the most important core libraries and explained how a component is structured. Finally I showed the most important code parts and explained how fast and easy development can be using the Mambo framework. At the end I tried a view in the near and far future of component development. I am currently translating the about 50 sheets to english and will release them to the community soon.

During the same time core team Member Brian Teeman made a nice workshop about the whole legal situation. He explained the GPL license and gave away valuable tricks about this license and other legal issues. Thomas Kahl hold a lecture about Mambo in commercial environments and talked about the pro's and con's of Mambo, when you have to build up large commercial websites. Sadly I could not visit those two myself due to my own workshop and therefore can only give this superficial description.

Afterwards from 7pm to about 8pm a panel discussion was held in the main hall. Both core members Brian Teeman and Alex Kempkens, Mambo eV chairman Robert Deutz, Thomas Kahl and myself were available for the visitors. Besides some more general questions we heavily discussed how to get more professional especially in 3rd party developments. Alex Kempkens announced that the core team will launch a seal of quality soon. Developer can get a commercial quality license for the components, which will cost about 250 Euro.

From the community the question came up to get quality and programming advisories (such as not hacking core tables i.e.) from the core team, to ensure high quality and equal standards even without the commercial license. Alex Kempkens denied the responsibility to help 3rd party developers in their quality management, while Brian Teeman pointed out, that such documents would exist on help.mamboserver.com (I overlooked the site again today and still can not find any programming advisories, a link would be nice). No final conclusion could be found on this topic.

Afterwards Brian Teeman made the last statement of the Mamboday. He was impressed by the whole day and thanked the organizers for it. Then he announced that finally a solution could be found about the copyrights hold by a company on the word Mambo on clothing. As a conclusion the core team will open up a merchandising shop soon, where you can buy a bunch of Mambo things.

After the Mamboday came to an end, we organizers, the two core team members and some others met in a restaurant, drank some beer and talked till 11pm.