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Building Websites with Mambo

Written by Peter Fournier

Monday, 10 October 2005

Book Review: Building Websites with Mambo, A step by step tutorial
By: Hagen Graf
PACKT Publishing, 2005
http://www.packtpub.com/
$39.99 US
RATING: Buy this Book!

Mambo is one of the best Open Source software packages available today. If you are looking for a software suite that will help you establish a high-quality, high-capability portal-type website, Mambo or it's recent offshoot Joomla, compares very favorably with commercial software packages and web-design service companies. And, of course, the price can't be beat: Mambo and Joomla easily match website creation packages and services in the $1,000 to $10,000 range.

However, Open Source fans know that price is not the key difference between Mambo or Joomla and commercial software or service offerings. No, the key difference is access to the source code and the capability to customize a package to meet your needs, now.

But customizing Mambo or Joomla can be a challenge, especially for inexperienced users. Understanding the ins and outs of templates, how exactly the permissions work, how to control the look and feel of articles, and even how to post an article so that it appears where you want it to may be beyond the easy understanding of the average non-technical user. Unfortunately, like most Open Source software projects, the existing Mambo and Joomla documentation isn't of much help. It's written by experts for knowledgeable people. Documentation is, I believe, one of the reasons Open Source software is not yet as popular as it should be¹.

So that's a long preamble to talking about “Building Websites with Mambo: A Step by Step Tutorial”. This book fills a gap between expert users who can read the code and figure things out from there² and inexperienced users who really just want to get the job done: they want to get their content up and administer their site.

"Building Websites with Mambo" does a good job of walking through Mambo and all the functions and capabilities of the program. It explains what content is in the context of Mambo, how the content is presented (frontpage, news items, static content, newsflashes), what menus are, how to control user interaction with the site (public, private, author, publisher, manager, administrator, etc.) and all the other concepts you need to understand to use and manage Mambo.

All this information is presented in an easy to read, easily understood tutorial format. For most people this is the ideal way to get the understanding they need to use Mambo: tell me what I need to know to do this or that. Don't give me a lot of theory and don't tell me more than I need to know.

I can also recommend “Building Websites with Mambo” to more experienced users. Having such a clear, simple presentation of all of Mambo's features is invaluable and, to my knowledge, not available anywhere else. The last few chapters are especially useful as an introduction to more advanced topics such as writing your own extensions to Mambo.

The only criticism I have, and I'm not sure it's a criticism really, is that the use of English is a bit odd. The book was originally written in German, translated, and then published by PACKT in England, I suspect with involvement with their Mumbai office in India. So in many places the use of English may seem odd to a North American ear.

“Building Websites with Mambo” is an excellent introduction to developing and running a website with Mambo. It's well written, complete, accurate, and accessible to the average user. Advanced users will find it's worth a read and useful as a quick basic reference.

Footnotes:

1 This is not to say that Microsoft documentation is adequate. Try reading the documentation for HTML Help for a graduate level mini-course on how NOT to write technical documentation! At least Mambo and Joomla documentation is better than that, but that's not saying much ...

2 But, I think the Mambo code is inadequately commented.

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