Just what is Mambo?

February 1, 2007 by Vito Ceniti

Mambo. Chances are you’re familiar with it or have at least heard of it. If not, you’ve no doubt visited a site built on the Mambo platform without even knowing it. So what is it? Well, Mambo is a fully featured content management system (CMS) that can be used to build and maintain a web site. It’s a user friendly intuitive tool that allows both novices and experts alike to efficiently and easily manage online content.

There are many uses for Mambo. According to a late-2005 survey conducted on the mamboserver site, the most popular use of Mambo is for personal or blog sites. That’s not surprising since blog sites have recently been one of the fastest growing segments of the Internet. The next most common use for Mambo is for portal sites, followed by community and ecommerce sites.

One of the main draws to this product is that you do not need to have any knowledge of HTML to manage your site. Mambo offers up a friendly Admin interface with point and click functionality that even the most inexperienced of users would be able to navigate. No need to know how to format or layout an HTML page. Mambo does it for you. Simply configure and manage your site content from within the menu driven Admin Panel. But that’s not to say that Mambo is a “simple” or “basic” application in terms of features. Quite the opposite. You can apply template changes to your site, you can manage a user database, you can even manage online polls. It can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.

Another reason that Mambo is so popular is that users have access to great product support. The development team is constantly changing and improving the product. As well, there is a very strong and healthy online community. If you’re ever stuck, you can always seek help from experienced Mambo users at http://forum.mambo-foundation.org. As well, chances are that if your web host offers Mambo, they will have tutorials in their support area.

These days many web hosts offer Mambo through their control panels. If your host doesn’t, it is easy enough to download at www.mamboserver.com. You can also download Mambo from a number of popular download sites such as sourceforge.net. Once downloaded, you simply configure it and upload it to your own web space on the Internet. It can run on both Linux and Windows platforms. You will need to make sure that your site is PHP enabled and that you have access to creating a MySQL database. This might be tricky for a beginner so it might be best to ask your host to load it for you if you feel you lack the experience. Often a host will do this for free, but there may be a small charge.

And the best part of it is that Mambo is free of charge. Mambo is released under the GNU General Public license (GNU GPL). Feel free to use this Open Source CMS any way you like. You can modify the code as much or as little as you wish. Just remember that you are not allowed to remove any copyright notices from the product.

Vito Ceniti

Vito Ceniti writes for www.demodemo.com, a provider of Flash tutorials for the web hosting industry. The company produces a comprehensive set of logo branded tutorials on a range of topics that web hosts buy and offer to their customers.