Mambo & Community (Part 2)

A few days ago, I wrote about the research that has been done into open source software and the need for development and communities to co-evolve. Today, I will focus on the development of the Mambo community.

The Mambo community suffered considerable disruption for some months following the Joomla! fork, then again with the severing of ties from Mambo’s former corporate sponsor. Due to popular misconception over the status of some fan sites, many users have yet to discover that the home of Mambo is at mambo-foundation.org. This has given me an extraordinary opportunity to observe the development of a community.

The Mambo project in the pre-fork days, used to tout itself as a meritocracy. It was, however, almost exclusively developer-focused and it was rare for anyone who had not proven themselves as a coder to be invited to join (unless it was to do the jobs that devs hate, like writing user documentation). Women seemed to be viewed as essentially clueless, but useful for writing docs or moderating forums.

Early this year, I discovered that the Mambo core team were not just listening to what users were saying, but also interested in exploring the issues being raised. The very first input I had into the current Mambo code was such a simple one, and so easily implemented, that I had to wonder why this oft-repeated request had not been actioned sooner. It was to get rid of the generator tag. This meta name=”Generator” tag is something I have been deleting from the core code for years. I asked for its removal in 2003 and noticed many requests for the same thing over the years. Apart from identifying Mambo sites for potential hackers, that tag served no other purpose than to provide a means of searching for Mambo sites. It took one dev to listen, and it was gone!

Fast forward to the present day. Many Mambo users have not yet discovered the official home of Mambo, so are unaware of how much progress there has been. Team Mambo is made up of people from all over the world. We are a mix of different cultures, languages, religion, and gender. There are several women on the team, including two on the core development team. We have a women’s mailing list for facilitating a greater involvement of women. And discussion about the direction the code should take, and testing of ideas, is open to everyone on the team with many of the discussions occurring on the forum so everyone can comment.

One of the most startling changes has been in the way the team take a wide view of Mambo. There is recognition of skills but in a departure from tradition, the skill-base of the team is not limited to an ability to code in PHP/MySQL. For example, I am on the core development team. While I can hack code, I could not sit down and write a complex script from scratch. I used to code (very useful skills today, not! – BASIC and CGI) but as any web developer will tell you, creating sites for clients means being able to read, understand, and hack core code. Programmers, however, do not necessarily have the skills with Mambo that a web designer/developer may have. They may not understand the SEO implications, or perhaps the usability considerations. They may be experts in regular expressions, but not aware of W3C standards. By taking the wider view, Mambo is not developing code for coders. The pooling of knowledge is moving us forward in a holistic development path. Mambo 4.7, for example, will have an accessible frontend, providing XHMTL 1.1 “out of the box” and meeting WCAG1.0 Priority 2 and most of Priority 3. How many years have users been asking for this? 4.7 is just the start. Accessibility is becoming part of the core code and although 4.7 is providing this for the front-end, the administration area of Mambo is following. This is not an add-on, this is a fundamental change in Mambo that has come about by the developers responding to users.

As more research starts to emerge about the importance of community in open source development, and case studies are being published on what makes a successful open source project, I compare the findings to what I am seeing with Mambo. And I can’t help thinking that the Joomla! fork may well prove to be the best thing that ever happened to Mambo. Remember, these are purely my own opinions and don’t represent the team or Foundation in any way, but, for me, the changes are a real breath of fresh air and augur very well for the future of Mambo.

Accessi-what?

From the first time I started working with Mambo, I wished to see the CMS offer greater accessibility. Firstly, I wanted to see the pages put together by Mambo be accessible to visitors, and ideally the back end as well. That was back in 2003! After many tribulations, we’re finally getting closer to see this happens. But what does it mean to you, the user?

What I say here isn’t new, it’s been said before, by me and others. Some will think it’s been covered “ad nauseum”, but it is an important topic to discuss.

Some people think that when we talk about “accessibility”, we mean strictly “disability access”. But I prefer to think in terms of “universal access”. What’s good for screenreading software is good for search engine bots, among other things. It’s almost becoming cliché that “Google is the biggest blind user on the web” In other words, increased accessibility to a site means search engines are likely to have an easier time crawling your site and finding the content you want them to find.

But having an accessible site is not just about blind users, or search engines. It’s also about people using different technologies to surf the web. What good is a table-based, fixed 800px width design to someone coming to your site via a handheld device, or a cell phone? One may reasonably argue for a mobile version of the site, but short of designing that, you will go far by having a site that follows basic accessibility guidelines.

Or it might mean that a user stuck in a country that doesn’t actually have high speed access (such as Bali for example) turns off loading of images for casual surfing, as they don’t want to wait for “hours” loading each page.

So, yeah, let’s think about universal access, not just disability access. It is about your content being deliverable to everyone, regardless of impairment status or technology.

So Mambo is taking that route. We’ll give you a system that will be able deliver pages that meet WCAG 1.0 requirements, almost to AAA, given the right template design.

Why only the front end at this point? In an ideal world, we’d do the changes so the back and front would be fully accessible. But this isn’t an ideal world, we have limited resources, limited time, etc. So we’re taking things one chunk at a time. First, the front end, because realistically there is going to be more “bang for the buck” by having that accessible. More visitors and users need the front end to be accessible than site designers and content managers need the back end to be accessible. As a disability rights advocate, I hate to appear to exclude people, but we’re not actually saying “no it won’t happen”. We’re saying “have a bit of patience, see what we’re delivering next for the front end, and have patience”

And next, we will work on the back end, because I really want to be able to have my brothers and sisters with disabilities able to use the system, both to surf, and to manage sites.

Mambo & Community (Part 1)

In the Open Source development world there is always much talk about “community”. OSS forum users often refer to the community of members that have registered on support forums. Does registering and posting a question give automatic membership in a community? Is there even a real community of interest amongst forum participants?

Some of you will be muttering, “Of course there is!” However, I am not so sure. Apache users, for example, are predominantly passive users, using the system in the same way they would use any commercial software and never becoming actively involved in Apache development. Let’’s look closer to home with the Mambo CMS. From observation, most people come to the Mambo support forums for support in solving a particular problem they may be having. They are generally passive users who have little interest in the Mambo CMS beyond it being a free tool that they want to use for their own purposes. Some will be more active and want to understand how the system works and how to make changes in the source code, but few set out to develop their skills to the point where they are able to actively contribute to the project. Identifying a community of interest from the activities on the Mambo forums is difficult. For many, there is no sense of community and no particular interest in the Mambo project, beyond what it can do for them. However, amongst the thousands of users across the official forums and fan sites, there have also some who work with the code, develop it, contribute back, and some who provide peer support to share their experience and knowledge with new users.

It is only in very recent times that there has been any research on OSS communities and how they contribute to development. Japanese researchers identified back in 2002 that:

For an OSS system to have a sustainable development, the system and the community must co-evolve. A large base of voluntarily contributing members is one of the most important success factors of OSS systems. … the evolution of an OSS community is effected by the contributions made by its aspiring and motivated members. Such contributions not only transform the role and influence of their contributors in the community and thus evolve the whole community, but also are the sources of the evolution of the system.Because the evolution of OSS communities and the evolution of OSS systems are mutually dependent, it is essential to the longterm success of OSS development that enough attention should be paid to the creation and maintenance of a dynamic and selfreproducing OSS communities. Project Leaders and Core Members of an existing OSS community should not only focus on the evolution of the OSS system itself, but also strive to create an environment and culture that fosters the sense of belongingness to the community and mechanisms that encourage new members to move toward the center of the OSS community through continual contributions.

From: Evolution Patterns of Open-Source Software Systems and Communities.

So, how does Mambo stack up? Is there a Mambo Community? In the second part of this article, I will give you my opinion on what is happening with Mambo and why I believe it is better now than it has ever been. Watch out for my next post.