Learning Mambo

by Sapphire (June 28, 2005)

I finally decided to buckle down and learn Mambo. I’ve always found it short on documentation, but they seem to be getting it together lately. And the interface seems to work better than I remember from my last attempt. And I found a really good Mambo tutorial by Anna that really speaks as one newbie to another.

Mambo is incredibly powerful. It’s overkill for a simple portal or directory site, although I wouldn’t discourage anyone from using it on a simple site. It’s ridiculously easy to add-on and alter.

I should mention that I didn’t bother installing it myself - I just used the Fantastico in cpanel. It wasn’t the latest version, so I found a patch, and guess how hard that was to install?

1. Upload in cpanel to the Mambo directory
2. Extract file.

Adding modules, themes and components is even easier, because you can do it within the Mambo admin panel. You go into the installer for whatever type of add-on you’re installing, and simply browse for the tar, gz or zip file you’ve already downloaded, then click “upload” and suddenly you have a new add-on.

Of course, using this stuff takes more learning. And it all depends what you’re doing. Anna’s tutorial is a great place to get started even if you’re trying to do something very specific, because she addresses the assumptions anyone would naturally make when they start playing with Mambo, and lets you know which ones are wrong. She also gives you some tips about things that can get really frustrating if you don’t know the answer, like uploading images.

At the moment, all I’m creating is a little personal portal for my own organization. Mambo has a nice way to organize all my links that I need almost daily, and it’s easy to use the front page as a sort of To Do list. I can keep records in blog form, but I think my next task will be to look for a form component, and maybe just browse around and see what else they have.

Posted in Tools
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