Comments on: Mambo missteps: a major split at an open-source CMS

By: Rob Cottingham » Mambo, meet Joomla!: a content management rival

Rob Cottingham » Mambo, meet Joomla!: a content management rival — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 21:31:53 +0000

[...] A month ago, the developers of Mambo, an open-source content management system, split with the new foundation created to oversee its development and promotion. The coders promised to continue developing their own version of the software. [...]

By: cms user

cms user — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 06:41:19 +0000

I just found out about this today too. I must say I’m glad the core team is splitting from Miro. Earlier this year I purchased a Mambo-based e-newsletter program, Oi! for an outrageous $600 thinking that by paying for a product it would work well and I’d be guaranteed support. Not so. Their forums for Oi! are inactive, unlike the forums for free open source products that inspire so much good will. They charge big bucks to answer questions after they have your initial payment. Over $1,000 for a business support package!

I’m now using phplists- a bit annoying to customize – but it can be done. I had been horrified to discover that the Oi! code had been encoded with Zend Optimizer, so no editing of the code (a long time Mambo user) for me.

In my correspondance with the company, Peter, their president – struck me as a money grubbing weasle. I could not see the marriage with the Open Source Mambo team as being an easy one.

May Miro die a business death they deserve.

By: Rob

Rob — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 14:38:08 +0000

Thanks for the post! Each CMS has its pros and cons, and for some people, Mambo's weaknesses outweigh its strengths; for you, clearly, they don't, and that's great. But I can't agree with you that there's a clear-cut "best" choice right now, and I don't see that changing in the near future. You didn't mention Drupal or Xoops, each of which strikes me as more obvious alternatives to Mambo -- especially with their large and enthusiastic developer communities. I don't see either of them going away any time soon. (There's a comprehensive list of open-source content management systems at OpenSourceCMS, with user reviews. By the way, it runs on, yes, Mambo.) I'll look forward to seeing the features promised in Mambo's version 5... features that users have been awaiting for a long, long time. In particular, I'd expect a modern CMS to be standards-compliant, starting with a much stronger commitment to CSS Mambo's displayed to date. Incidentally, the single biggest weakness I see in this space remains documentation, followed by the user interface. Mambo is better than most on both counts, but every open-source CMS I've seen has yet to produce a straightforward, comprehensive, well-written and well-structured manual... especially one that covers the tricky middle ground between the absolute beginner and the expert. (I'll add the caveat that I haven't read the Typo3 book yet.)

By: Mr CMS

Mr CMS — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 10:20:24 +0000

I’m curious to know what you call a modern CMS ?
PHPNuke is oversized regarding its features, slow performances, server hungry and very rigid in term of design.
Typo 3 is powerful but needs dedicaced server and a development team because his hight learning curve.
SPIP is easy but lacks a good members management and API.
Zope is slow and not so easy…
I don’t see any other open source based CMS than Mambo who combine power , clarity and ease of use.

So for the moment the best choice remains Mambo, the roadmap of version 5 promised ti bring us all tthe crucial missing features : real template system, team management for story publication, …

And don’t forget, often news CMS with so called modern fonction disappear as quickly as they appear