Friday, January 26th, 2007
at 10:19am
Having been a user of Joomla, and it’s predecessor, Mambo, I can easily tell you that the two products are very powerful. Mambo and Joomla are content management systems that help even novice users manage the content on their sites easily. In this review I will be focusing on the strengths of the powerful Joomla framework and how it can be used for a community site.
Joomla by itself is one immense package, giving you lots of features right out of the box. Aside from content management, you get a links system, contacts pages, an RSS reader and several other basic components. If you are looking to build a small site for your business, this will often suffice.
With some extensions (as they are formally known, and include modules, components and plugins) you can transform your site into a powerful community or intranet. Joomla provides the framework for components like Joomlaboard (a fully-integrated forum) and Community Builder (for user profiling and member lists). Hundreds of third-party components exist, and cover dozens of applications, from help desks to event calendars.
If you already use certain tools on your web site, like Simple Machines Forum or Coppermine Gallery, there are components released by the community to integrate them with the Joomla environment.
For changing the look and feel of your site, Joomla has a templating system that uses PHP for its template tags. Although many people find this to be rather annoying, the next major release (Joomla 1.5) will have an new system with designer-friendly tags. However there will also be backwards compatibility for current templates as well.
For many kinds of sites, simple static HTML won’t make the cut. Communities and enterprises need more that the traditional web-site building tools. Content management systems like Joomla will fulfill many needs of these organizations, and can be easily extended to fit their needs.
Saturday, December 3rd, 2005
at 11:48pm
I started using Mambo, an open-source content management system, for my own personal web site, after discovering it while exploring CMSs on Wikipedia. After first installing it, I was intimidated by the abundance of menus and icons scattered around the interface. A small while later, I learned the ins and outs of how everything worked, from menus to components to modules. There are many decent templates for Mambo available, but I can’t really find any (if you have any suggestions, make a comment below). When it comes to components, there are ones that do the most bizarre things. I found a school component, which organizes students, classes, and tests. Of the more common ones are myPMS, a private messaging system. Modules are little widgets that sit on the top, sides and bottom of pages (as defined by your template). Mambots are little programs that search through the contents of text and can replace certain strings with images, code highlighting and more. Templates are – you guessed it – the skin of your site, defines the look and feel of your pages and also the possible module positions. I do have some complaints: I wish that the administrator console would be somewhat faster and that good templates would be easier to find, but pretty much everything else is good. My conclusion: Mambo is an excellent product, with just a few rough edges.
Monday, October 24th, 2005
at 3:17pm
After a week and a half of downloading and uploading templates, modules and components, my new site is finally up. You can visit it by clicking this link [broken link removed]. You’ll notice that it has a nice design (from a template), a login… form, and a poll. The sond two of these features are implemented through Mambo’s included modules, which are small items placed on the sides of the page (or at least most of the time; the navbar menus are also modules). You can get modules for your Mambo site from dozens of places, one of which is MamboForge.net, the Mambo equivalent of SourceForge. In addition, there are components, which are applications that fit in to your site, and range from forums to support ticket systems (examples: Simpleboard Forum, WebAmoeba Ticket System).Lastly, there are mambots, or small snippets that insert something into a content page (ex. images, page breaks). For more on the dozens of features of Mambo, visit www.mamboserver.com
