Mambo Open Source advertises itself with bold claims:
- Mambo Open Source is the finest open source Web Content Management System available today.
- The easiest to use CMS there is.
Does it live up to these self-imposed expectations? I installed it and tested it a bit. Here are my first impressions:
- Installation via the web installer is very easy - however, you won't find any instructions on the homepage about how to do it. You have to switch to the documentation server for that.
- Mambo supports various languages. The basic package only contains English though. If you want additional languages, you search the homepage in vain for hints or links. Only Google unearths the Mamboportal, where you can finally find what you're looking for.
- There is plenty of documentation for Mambo. It's worth taking a look at beforehand. Unfortunately, there isn't a single link to the documentation from the homepage - it's on a different server.
- The standard layout is surprisingly good for a standard template. However, it has some nasty display errors with Mozilla (text wrapping issues, graphics overlapping). Especially from an open source project, I would expect it to at least properly support the open source browser par excellence (Mozilla)!
- Mambo has WYSIWYG HTML editing fields. Unfortunately, in a variant that only works with IE. I'd like someone to explain to me why a Mozilla-compatible variant isn't used instead (especially since they exist)!
- Search engine-friendly links (i.e., those without query strings) are optionally supported, which is good. However, they're not used as standard, and modules often use normal links instead. These naturally won't be converted. Links are hardcoded, not generated programmatically, so such an implementation only works if the template creator remembers to add the function calls themselves. However, this feature is still very new, so it will probably spread.
- Mambo strictly requires MySQL. I always find it a shame when software locks itself into a single database. For PHP there is PEAR for database access, so you don't have to restrict yourself like that.
- Mambo is incompatible with PHP's Safe Mode! Completely incompatible: if Safe Mode is active, you can't install components. Error messages point to errors with mkdir.
- Mambo basically needs write permissions on its entire tree. So either you have to set everything under owner www-data, or make it world-writable. Combined with the missing Safe Mode support, this means secure operation is only possible in a chroot jail!
- Additional modules (I looked at, for example, yopsFM and Mamblog) are of very varying quality, especially regarding layout integration and consideration of search engine-friendly links.
- The administration interface sometimes uses confusing terminology - what is a module, what is a component?
- Mambo is a plug-and-play-possible package. After installation, you have a finished system with a finished layout to play with. This can be a decisive advantage!
- There are lots of ready-made modules that you can pull in when building a new site.
Generally speaking: Mambo is an absolutely impressive tool, there's no question about that. Of all the PHP-based CMS I've looked at so far, it's definitely the most convincing (Typo3, for example, was much more confusing and harder to access - and I have CMS experience with Zope and various custom developments). So this isn't about dissing Mambo - anyone looking for a powerful CMS, already using PHP+MySQL as a base and comfortable with it, and willing to read the documentation, will definitely be well served by Mambo. What is absolutely bullshit, however, is the hype that the Mambo programmers are creating around their product. It's only as simple as they claim if you just edit content and don't do anything more advanced with it. Otherwise, you'll also spend time at Mambo digging through the documentation (at least it exists!) and if necessary looking at source code. However, to be fair, the same can be said of Plone: there's also a lot of hype there that unfortunately also misses reality. Put your code where your mouth is! When you look at Mambo's source code, that's where the crux of the matter lies: anyone who is a PHP guru will certainly be able to dig through the PHP sources. But modules with thousands of lines of source code aren't everyone's cup of tea - searching for bugs and features becomes quite laborious. I don't see a major advantage of Mambo over Zope or Plone here. Mambo is not small! You always have to keep that in mind - getting into Mambo is similar to getting into Zope. Mountains of source code, but well-structured extensibility. A clear gain compared to Zope is Mambo's plug-and-play approach. The first working page comes together much faster. In principle, you shouldn't really compare Mambo with Zope, but rather with Plone, since Mambo - like Plone - already offers completely finished content tools.
Another advantage is Mambo's rather modest server requirements: Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP = LAMP. You can get that on any street corner. Zope hosting is harder to find (or you get a root server, then you won't have any problems with Zope or Plone).