By 2008, Mambo was already a shadow of its former self -- Joomla had taken the lion's share of developers and users three years earlier. But the remaining Mambo faithful still had grievances. In April 2008, four core developers -- Chad Auld, Ozgur Cem Sen, Richard Ong, and Al Warren -- decided they'd had enough of the Mambo Foundation's policies and processes, which they felt were actively harming both the code and the community.

They forked Mambo 4.6.3 and named their creation MiaCMS. Development moved fast: MiaCMS 4.6.4 shipped in May 2008, followed by 4.6.5 in June and a service pack in September. Mambo core developer Neil Thompson joined the team in September 2008, lending additional credibility.

But momentum is hard to sustain when you're forking a project that was already losing relevance. By July 2009, the MiaCMS team decided to merge their efforts with Martin Brampton's Aliro project, recognizing that two small teams working on similar problems were weaker apart than together. The merger was pragmatic but effectively marked the end of MiaCMS as an independent project.

Minimal. MiaCMS was a fork of a fork's leftovers. But the merger with Aliro was a rare example of two small open-source projects recognizing strength in numbers.