I just found out about an incredible looking open source CMS called Mambo.
They’ve been nominated as the Best Free Software Project in the 2004 Linux Format Awards (which I hadn’t heard of before but if you’re a Linux user you would probably enjoy voting), and from the short time I’ve looked at their product, I can see why. It’s remarkable.
You can try it out by managing the demo site. You just log in to the administration page (even the login page looks great) with username: admin, password: admin, and away you go.
You can also demo dozens of other CMSs at OpenSourceCMS (including Mambo) to get a feel for how they work before you spend time installing them yourself.
I’m just floored at how complete and professional Mambo appears, and yet it’s free. It feels like a high-end, super-expensive CMS that would be used by big web sites. In fact, on Mambo’s front page they say Porsche of Brazil uses Mambo to manage their site. It looks nothing like the demo templates which tells me it’s customizable. They say that the US Porsche site is not powered by Mambo, although I think it looks great the way it is.
Anyway, back to Mambo. I highly recommend you try out the demo and change things around. You have full administrative privileges to manage the site, so you can do almost anything. I created a poll, wrote a news flash, changed the template of the site and poked around in several other areas to get a feel for it and as you can tell, I was very impressed.
I followed a long and winding road to find out about Mambo, but I’m glad I found it. It started by reading William’s post about how much he liked Total Choice Hosting. I looked at their hosting plans to see what they offered and was impressed, but then I remembered looking at Blue Host a while ago which had an even better deal than TCH, but I wasn’t sure if they were a reliable web hosting provider. I looked around for people who were using BlueHost and came across a post at Huddled Masses asking if BlueHost was a good hosting service (others seem to like their service) and mentioned in passing that Mambo was an amazing CMS, so I took a look. I’m glad I did.
I feel like creating a brand new site about something just so I can use Mambo and find out if its functionality lives up to its user interface.
Thanks for finding this! I can’t wait to give it a try — I’ve been looking for something along these lines for a while now.
Mambo looks nice enough, though not sufficiently different from Drupal to make me want to switch, but what I really want is one of those Porsches. Vrooom!
I *love* Mambo – I discovered it a couple months ago, and you’re right – it’s completely customizable. The template system is a piece of cake, and you don’t even really need any PHP programming knowledge (though it’s helpful). There’s a Macromedia Dreamweaver extension that gives you shortcut buttons for inserting all of the required PHP code for a Mambo template into your existing or newly created web site. You can get it here: http://mamboforge.net/frs/?group_id=106&release_id=1801
Enjoy Mambo! :)
Oh and I always want to tell you about Vizaweb: http://www.vizaweb.com
Leo: http://www.leoville.com/blog (also ownls: http://www.leoville.tv and http://www.leovilletownsquare.com ) Trusts Vizaweb very much and he has a very big site. Seems like a good host!
Yep.. look at the code (view source) on that porsche site :)
Mambo is awsome guys.