Silicon Chisel

Mambo is not really a new CMS. It has been around a while. It’s earlier incarnation was pretty dreadful, though. These earlier versions were slow, poorly organized, and seemed to do more to obscure your content than help publish it. But the latest releases are nothing short of incredible. (Note that this site is built with Mambo 4.5.2).

The basic content metaphor is one of publish/unpublish. This means that any element of the site, from a calendar component to a news bulletin, can be shown or hidden. Publishing of content items can also be pre-programmed to happen at a later date, as well as pre-programmed to expire at a later date. This is very handy for many business and eCommerce applications. Content editing can be done via straight HTML editing, or using one of several available WYSIWYG editors which are integrated into the system via the “Mambot” interface. While obviously not as robust as using Front Page or DreamWeaver, given that almost all of the style aspects of a page are taken care of by the template system, these are more than adequite for the job.

Note that some of these editor Mambots do not function well on the Macintosh. And bear in mind that they are JavaScript, so there will be quirks to be seen depending on which platform and browser authoring is being done on. All the editors have an “html mode” so it is always possible to drop down to raw code when needed.