Big thanks to Rob Loy for the opportunity to present to his class tonight at Scottsdale Community College on the Mambo content management system. Mambo is an opensource CMS that rides ontop of PHP and MySQL and runs cross-platform. As promised, here is the powerpoint from tonight’s talk. There were some great questions asked tonight, some to which I could not give a solid answer. I’ll try and clarifiy some things below but if you have any questions regarding the framework itself or any of the other stuff we discussed tonight, feel free to use the comments section here as a forum.
To the gentleman that asked about which to choose going forward- Mambo or the new re-branded Joomla after further reading I would say it’s a safe bet that either will be supported but that I really like what I see on the Joomla Roadmap. They claim it’s not a true development fork but rather a simple re-branding of an existing product which is true, but they’re diverging codebases from this point and that’s the definition of a development fork so, call it whatever you want. I would say Mambo has a much larger base of existing sites but it looks like the inertia of the development community is behind Joomla and all the features of the latest Mambo release should be compatible so you don’t lose anything in terms of components and template designs. I would probably start a new project on Joomla rather than Mambo at this point.
Regarding the question about the recent security exploit I mentioned, apparently the official patch took a few days before it was posted but manual fixes to the code were immediately available in the forums the same day the problem was discovered (just meant you had to edit the PHP code by hand). Someone had asked about how to stay notified of security announcements and that link is here.
Lastly, to the woman with the animal shelter site and the question about how to turn off certain navigational elements on an index of content items- I know it can be done because I’ve done it on my sites but I’m not seeing the option at the moment. I’ll post a comment when I find it- it’s buried somewhere in one of the tabbed menus on like a section or category- i don’t remember which.
Anyhow, great questions tonight and it really was a pleasure getting to speak with the students in Rob’s class. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if you have them- Mambo’s developer community is perhaps one of its strongest assets.
-sean
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And sure enough within a minute of posting that entry I found the answer that I’ve been hunting for regarding how to hide the filters and nav elements- it’s a setting you access by going to the menu manager and choosing the menu item that links to your "table – content category" page. From there, you click the parameters tab across the top and it opens a whole slew of options (most of which I recommend disabling since it makes the page look nicer and filters are really pointless unless you have a ton of items).
HTH
-sean