JOOMLA HOSTING REVIEWS

Joomla CMS or Mambo?

You have heard of Mambo Open Source or you have even used Mambo for a while. Then you heard that Mambo developers' team left Mambo and started Joomla!. Now you wonder what is next – shall Mambo continue to exist without its creators? Isn't it better to choose Joomla?

In the beginning Mambo was a commercial product. The original developers decided they were not going to release any more versions and it was released as Open Source software. It was soon adopted by an international team of professional web developers and it matured into the excellent Mambo 4.5.2.

The Open Source development team driving the improvement and growth of Mambo had a disagreement with Miro International (the sponsor of Mambo). Some of the developers made a clean break and formed Open Source Matters. They took the latest version of Mambo released under the GNU Open Source license, re branded it as Joomla and continued to develop it as their own product.

Both Joomla CMS and Mambo have the following basic features:

• Multiple WYSIWYG content editor support
• Content syndication (RSS).
• Simple polls
• Media (images, documents) upload and management.
• Advertising management (banners, etc).
• Trash manager
• Content display scheduling.
• Search engine friendly (SEF) URL's.
• Page caching mechanism to improve performance on busy sites
• Multilingual support and interface translation
• Content macro language (aka mambots)
• Advanced package/addon/template deployment system
• Simple but powerful template system
• Hierarchial user access groups
• Basic visitor statistics
• Content voting system

Mambo Open Source Advantages:

Mambo is a full-featured content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. It has a large user community. Mambo was created long before Joomla and has a large user-base with active participation in forums and capacity to provide online support to each other. Mambo has a long list of addons – components, modules, mambots – for extra functionality.

Several months ago, Mambo was taken by Miro International. This company provides stable financial and corporative backup to the project and guarantees its development in the future.

The most recent version of Mambo released – Mambo 4.5.3.

Joomla Open Source Features:

As Mambo developers have started Joomla! and left Mambo, there are concerns that Mambo may start losing its power and degrade in time. However, Joomla developers have plenty of experience and are already proving their reputation is well-founded. Joomla is developing at a very fast pace. Although the project was launched some time in September 2005 with version 1.0, Joomla has already released version 1.0.7, while Mambo is still working on 4.5.3 version. Also, Joomla is quickly catching up with the development of components and addons for websites built in Joomla.