Mambo vs Joomla

History of Mambo and Joomla.

Mambo started out as a commercial product developed by Miro International. The original developers decided they were not going to release any more versions and released Mambo as Open Source software. It was soon adopted by an international team of professional web developers and it matured into the excellent Mambo Content Management System many of us know and love. Mambo is now a well featured content management system with many 3rd Party add ons which enable you to quickly build a well featured web site for a fraction of the cost of writing all the code yourself.

All seemed to be going well until mid-2005. In a nutshell the Open Source development team driving the improvement and growth of Mambo had a disagreement with Miro (who we believe were providing a certain amount of financial backing and support). So the developers made a clean break and set up Open Source Matters. They took the latest version of Mambo released under the GNU Open Source license, rebranded it as 'Joomla!' and continued to develop it as their own product.

Since the split Joomla has gone from strength to strength. There have been many revisions and updates to Joomla and the Joomla comunity is very active. It is not an exaggeration to say that there is more activity in the Joomla Camp than the Mambo camp these days.

Mambo is now developed by a new team of developers and is every bit as good as it always was. Mambo continues to be a respected and popular CMS solution.

We can install the latest stable version of Mambo or Joomla free of charge with any of our hosting plans.

Mambo & Joomla - what's the difference?

Currently Mambo & Joomla are very similar - not surprising as they can both trace their roots back to the same source code. It is also fair to say that Mambo and Joomla support most of same 3rd Party modules - this fact alone is one of the reasons why they are so similar.

Where they differ is in the level of activity of the communities that support them. Joomla has a very active community of developers, users and supporters. Joomla has just won the Best PHP Open Source Content Managment System Award.

Mambo & Joomla - are they right for you?

Both Mambo and Joomla are well featured content management systems. The software itself is free and there are many 3rd party add ons (free and commercial) which allow you to customize the look and feel of your site and add and extra features.

Mambo and Joomla enable you to quickly build a well featured web site for the fraction of the cost and time that it would normally take. You don't have to be a web developer to use them, but technical experience of building web sites is really going to help you build a better site. Like anything else it requires time & effort to get the best out of either system. There are lots of good books available on Amazon and the Mambo forums & Joomla forums are the best place to seek support and advice.

Mambo and Joomla are recommended if you fall into any/all of the following groups:

• you have a limited budget
• you need to build a web site quickly
• you already have some experience of building web sites
• you are willing to seek advice and contribute to discussions on community forums
• you have general, non unique requirements from your site

Mambo & Joomla - the downside

Free software isn't really free. You pay for it in terms of the time it takes you to learn how to use it, fix bugs, apply security patches, etc.

It's also worth noting that code for 3rd party modules is written by many different developers and is often buggy. If you do use 3rd party add ons make sure that they come with some kind of official support, so you have somebody to contact in the event of a problem. Also, 3rd party modules will often only work a certain way - if you have unique requirements then building a custom web site is going to be a better option for you.

Security is another important issue, as with any form of open source software. To maintain the security of your Mambo or Joomla web site it is essential that you keep the software up to date by applying security patches to the core software and to any 3rd party add ons.

What you pay for is what you get & so long as you go into this with your eyes open you will be fine.

Mambo & Joomla - the future

This is where it gets interesting. The official release of Joomla 1.5 is iminent, and this is billed as "the most significant watershed in Joomla's history". 

A disscusion of Joomla 1.5 features can be found here

Mambo have announced a version 5.0 in their roadmap and this is also billed as a significant release, however at this time no launch date is available for version 5.0.

There is every chance that Mambo & Joomla will become very different after these releases.

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