Mambo CMS Review- Mambo is an open source software Content Management System (CMS), previously known as Mambo Open Source (MOS). The fact that it’s open source means that users can adapt it however they want. Read this article by Web Host Ranking to see what you can do with Mambo.
What Is a CMS?
Content management systems are software for managing content, whether files like documents, audio and video, and images, or entire websites. Licensed under the GNU GPL (General Public License) license, Mambo can be copied, modified, and/or distributed by users. It is one of many CMS’s offered with a GPL license.
Mambo CMS’s History
The Mambo CMS got its start in 2000 as a project of Miro Construct Pty Ltd. In Melbourne, Australia. A commercial CMS was introduced in 2002, but for several years there were side-by-side commercial and open source products, both bearing the name Mambo. After legal problems involving accusations about the intellectual property rights in some of the source code, the commercial version was
renamed Jango and a non-profit foundation was formed in 2005. In response, the developers quit and created a website named OpenSourceMatters.org, a project that became Joomla! CMS. Meanwhile, Mambo formed a new team and, in July 2006, became independent of corporate interests. MiaCMS was another fork, created in 2008. Mambo 4.6.5, the current version in June 2010.
Mambo won a number of awards in 2004 to 2006 as a Linux project, including “Best Free Software Project of the Year” and “Best Open Source Solution” three times. Given that no news has been posted on the Mambo site since September 27, 2008, it’s difficult to say what’s been happening since then.
How Mambo Is Used
The backend of Mambo is accessed through a browser, allowing website development without expensive stand-alone programs. There are templates to help construct pages, components to add functionality, modules to build templates, and Mambots, which are Mambo plug-ins.
Mambo Website
Mambo’s motto is “Power in Simplicity,” but its tangled net of websites on which it is impossible to find basic information completely belies the motto. Besides the lack of news, which may be concerning, searching for basic starting information, like samples of how Mambo is used, technical requirements, a list of features, and access to extensions or plug-ins is like going through a maze. The most recently registered project is dated December 10, 2009. The forum is still active, as of June 2010, but there’s not a sense of an active site, a vibrant community, and a lot of new development going on.
Other concerns are present, too. Some of the site pages take an exceptionally long time to load for pages with nothing but text, and given that the site is presumably developed using Mambo, this raises concerns for what would happen with a site rich with multimedia, etc. Further searching reveals that there are a bunch of different sites that are not well integrated, and the relationship between them is difficult to fathom. Mambo-code.org seems dead, but that’s where you end up if you go to mambo-developer.org and click on downloads to try to get the product. On mambo-developer.org, the most recent project is dated September 2008, and the different dates on duplicate lists with the same name but on different sites gives a sense of chaos. Two “What Is Mambo?” discussions were also found in different spots. A list of Mambo “official sites” was finally discovered on mambo-manual.org, and lists six other sites, but does not include, mambo-manual.org, mambo-code.org or mambo-developer.org, leading to the conclusion that there are at least nine different sites. If the division of material is supposed to provide clarity, it has utterly failed.
Mambo CMS’s Technical Requirements
Mambo CMS can be installed on a local computer or a server. Mambo 4.6 requires Apache servers and works with Linux Mac OS X, BSD, and Windows 2000/XP. PHP must be 4.4 or higher, and MySQL can be 4.x or 5.x, but does not run on 5.x in strict mode.