So, I’ve been growing more and more dissapointed with our current CMS the we use at the school for our website (PHP website). Don’t get me wrong, I don’t find anything really wrong wit it, but it isn’t as full-featured as I would have hoped it would be by now, and it runs fairly slow on my current servers (Netware 6.5 w/Apache 2 &PHP 4 – a story for another day.
I’ve also been looking for a very easy to use and remotely administer CMS for my wife’s upcoming website , and I stumbled across OpenSourceCMS , a great site that has info on a boatload of open source CMS (Content Managemant Systems, for thoso of you who haven’t figured it out yet…) and gives you live admin access to a lot of them to try them out. It resets each one every two hours, but that’s enough time to get a good feelfor how they work. Another good site is CMSMatrix , which lets you search and compare the CMS systems and their features.
So after a bunch of virtual tire kicking, I’ve decided that Mambo is the coolest CMS out there. (actually, Typo3 seemed kind of cool as well, but it didn’t click the way Mambo did).
One of the collest things I found about mambo was the ability to upload extensions (they call them components, modules, or mambots) as .zip files right through the web interface and install them. It realy mad my two hours on OpenSourceCMS very useful, as I was able to measure the worth of the 3rd party extensions as well as the core software.
After installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on my PowerBook, I had a testbed Mambo servier running in all of 2 minuites. There was absolutely no problem with the install at all. The templates are easy to work with, and the community-based support has been great so far.
The two sites I keep finding answers on are: Mamboportal.com and Mambers.com . Mamboportal.com
That’s all for today. I’ll get more into Mambo as I find time to type – but if you want to check out my test mambo site fo the schools, it’s http://www1.aurora-schools.org/phpscripts/mambo