mambo 5.0 roadmap suggestion

[postme]

Hi,

The roadmap keeps improving with all kinds of nice pictures detailing the ideas behind them

I'd like to respond to two ideas:
1. Content stored as XML in database
2. Seperate logic from presentation

Both are closely related and I did some experimentation on my own following the indepth discussions we had in the forum and by email.

My suggestion would be:
1. Use either XHTML 1.1 or DocBook as the default content storage format. My suggestion would be to use DocBook, it's less bound to web browsers (so more channel indepedent), it's much richer in expressing specific elements with inherent semantic meaning (<artheader>, <section>, <para> etc..) and it offers inline semantic attributes that can be transformed into rdf expressions. The latter might be a bit esoteric for release 5.0 but it's there and you can use it for a release further down to road to enhance the appeal of mambo even further. On the negative side, DocBook requires an XSL transformation while XHTML 1.1 doesn't need this. However, the transformation would be purely internal DocBook --> XHTML and doesn't require that cmt designers need to know this.
2. If choosing DocBook how to go about the XSL stuff? I've thought long and hard about this and scoured the internet for the right approach. The problem is that you can't depend on hosting providers always offering the exact mix of PHP extensions. My own hosting provider offers xml but not xslt. PHP 5 is bound to solve this as it is much more xml/xsl oriented but that's still some time of being the default installation. Luckily I found a purely PHP based xml/xsl/dom library (I looked at Domit! but it doesn't offer xsl stuff) at http://www.anter.com.ua/myXML/. It does most of what I want, even some of the more unusual xsl stuff but it's not a complete implementation of xslt 1.0 (yet). Having said that, it does have a very active developer who responds quickly to suggestions. With myXML I can transform DocBook into XHTML 1.1, I found a set of nice xsl stylesheets at http://dsoulayrol.free.fr/soft/achille/index.html (in french) that with some adaptation can transform DocBook to XHTML 1.1. I will make a complementatry (set) of xsl stylesheets to transform XHTML 1.1 to DocBook. A predefined set of CSS can be used to easily convert between DocBook and XHTML 1.1. This would also ease the life of CMT developers as they can influence the look and feel via a standard set of CSS instructions.

Just some thoughts... and now onwards with webdav (yes I'm still working on it, took me some time to find out that webfolders in IE 6 are **** and things not working were not because of errors on my side ).

Cheers,

Meint

[Gayle]

DocBook! PLEASE!

I was actually thinking of converting the MOS manual to DocBook when a final version is released (as an experiment). Should be able to generate HTML/PDF/Text versions all from one source then.

[postme]

Should be able to generate HTML/PDF/Text versions all from one source then.

yup, and you can use it with OpenOffice (native support for DocBook and PDF). That's why I suggested it, the webdav connector I'm writing is used by OpenOffice to open/save documents to mambo and DocBook is the only sensible format (the native openoffice format is quite complex and their html output s*cks major time).

cheers,

Meint

[Gayle]

Originally Posted by postme

their html output s*cks major time

One feature we were all hoping wouldn't be copied from MS Office