[rrottman]

I have taken the liberty to take a deeper look into Mambo Server 4.5. I have not come across to use Mambo before I have been pointed to it by the posts in this forum.

Generally I like the clean administrator interface and the massive use of CSS in every area of the system. Installation was easy and everything worked perfectly well from minute 1.

I then tried to dive into templating and the Mambo code in order to get a feeling for what it would mean to possibly integrate parts of it (user registration, etc.) with vB. My final conclusion is: I don't try to integrate. Here are my main reasons, and again, no offense ment, I understand that Mambo is an Open Source initiative and possibly most of the developers invest their free time as opposed to being paid for it. So this is more or less my try to explain my main concerns with Mambo and obviously, it's only my personal opinion:

Key weaknesses:

1. Almost no documentation.
Mambo has a strong leck of documentation. Most of the documentation available on the projects site is either outdated, incomplete or 100% under construction. There are areas which are not covered at all. While a free templating system in PHP is a great tool, part of its value is driven by the ability to customize. Without a proper coverage of concepts and techniques, you're lost. Even if you have a strong background on CMS systems and PHP.

2. Inconsistency of the architecture.
I don't particularly understand the reasons why, but Mambo uses different concepts when it comes to dealing with templates. Chances are, I'm just spoiled by vB's consistency, but in Mambo there is a mixture between database driven content, file based templating, CSS (file) driven design and even other concepts (like PHP include techniques). For example: Most template parts are fetched by a "Mambo function" (mosLoadComponent) but the page footer has to be included by include_once("includes/footer.php"). [Yes, the includes path is not variable, it's hardcoded.]. While mainly three CSS classes allow you to control content presentation to a certain degree, other parts of the look and feel have to be hardcoded. A good example of this mixture is the pathway (breadcrumbs). The general idea is, that a simple include("pathway.php") does the trick and you can style the pathway via CSS. This is true for 99% of the pathway EXCEPT a little orange arrow in front of it. If you want to get rid of it or change it to the icons and buttons your website uses, the only way is to either rewrite the pathway.php script or exchange the image file.

I only had about an hour to look into all this, but my overall impression is, that Mambo needs some basic enhancement towards a consistent approach here. I believe that one of vB's key advantages is its concept of EVERYTHING IN THE DB.

3. Leck of free 3rd party resources.
Getting no docs on Mambo's homepage, I tried to find background information elsewhere. While there are some really nice templates out there (most of them you have to pay for) the overall quality of the tutorials I found has been weak. They all seem to have started as proud initiatives to stand in for the total leck of docs by the Mambo developers but ended up with way too much work.

All in all I have put Mambo on my internal "Watch List". I still think it's one of the Open Source projects which you should consider visiting now and again. If you plan to put a quick news portal type of website online, you can get it with Mambo within less than 10 minutes. If you want full consistent control and integration, it'll be a difficult road to go.

One last remark: Mambo has successfully been integrated with some forum systems. My remarks here do not say, that it is *not at all* possible. I am just pretty critical concerning some overall concepts of Mambo and the quality of accompanying material. Again, maybe it's the fault of the amazing team at vBulletin, that I'm way too ciritcal... your feedback is welcome.