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May 26, 2005

Learning To Mambo

I spent my morning doing an up-close-n'-personal install and customization with a new content management package called Mambo. I'm blown away.

As my consulting project has deepened, my relationship with eZ Publish has soured. Despite its early promise, I have found the process of customizing eZ to be excruciatingly painful. Yes, it has some excellent features. But the day-to-day experience of using the damn thing always wound up frustrating me; its layers upon layers of features (and, therefore, complexity) meant that the rabbit hole kept getting deeper.

Interestingly, as I looked for solutions to my eZ Publish problems, I kept running in to blog entries from others who were experiencing my same issues. This made me more confident that the problem was the product, and not just some bizarre learning curve I was on. In fact, many (most) of these folks were jumping/had jumped to another CMS, and the vast majority of those were using Mambo.

So I tried it.
WOW!

Short version: it's got the features I need (open, customizable, support for PDF, RSS and podcasting, WYSIWYG editing, search statistics, Urchin compatibility, etc.). It's wicked fast. There's a thriving third-party community building modules and add-ons. And the interface for the administrator(s) (my client) is MUCH friendlier and cleaner.

If you want to check out the admin interface, click here (opens in a new window). Username and password are both 'admin'.

So we'll try this for a while - but so far, it's astounding.

UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 26, 2005 2:35 PM. Posted to Geek.

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