Forum Moderators: phranque
Any suggestions of a Mambo-like competitor that is better?
Hope this helps.
NS
It can depend on what purpose they'll be used for and how much of a tolerance there is for a steep learning curve. Things look a whole lot different to a techie type than they do to a non-techie; so functionality and ease of use have to be balanced off.
thanks for the replies. this is a more general question, but how do mambo-like content management systems work in terms of search engine optimization. my biggest fear in using one of these is that I will lose a lot of my ability to tweek things for the search engines.
Here is good suggestion..
1) First make a list of good cms you are aware of
2) Make a list of your requirements
3) Check out the demo of those CMS on their sites
4) See which one you like the most and has the features you need.
By the way.. Mambo has SE Friendly features within it and so does few others.
Hope this helps.
NS
The s/e friendly doesn't work with Mambo when it's installed with Fantastico because the configuration file can't be written to. Any way of dealing with that or getting around it with just htaccess?
There are SO many add-ons modules and components available, with such a big, active development community there's nothing not being worked on. There's even a hack now to incorporate old flat HTML pages into it. I believe there's even integration with osCommerce and a photo gallery being worked on, and I've just scratched the surface.
I just need to get the rewrite taken care of and this is what I'd like to dig into.
Also, in addition to Mambo's built-in SEF (search engine friendly) URL's, there's an additional commercial add-on module (called a "component") to enable those URL's to include keywords. That add-on is called "SEF advance".
Both require that mod_rewrite be enabled on your server.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 3:13 pm (utc) on Aug. 16, 2004]
[edit reason] URL removed [/edit]
It's not getting the query strings any more, so - so far so good. But every time you click back to the homepage from another page within the site you get to it with a different URL. THAT is a big problem.
I'll dig around for that module, thanks.
There's one other out there that looks good from a S/E friendly perspective, but with all the looking I've done, Mambo and Drupal are 100% at the top of the list.
I've looked at the "official" Mambo open source site, and it seems the auther of SEF Advance is a Mambo Core Developer, so he'd be expert at dealing with any issues involved. I know it's being used at some major sites without a problem, so I believe I'll contact him directly about this specific issue.
That should solve most, if not all of the issues.
Had to put it aside for a few weeks for other more pressing things, but back to it this week. There's no .ini file that I know of, it's Linux virtual hosting with only .htaccess to work with, and the software generates the pages on the fly.
Here's some great sites for comprehensive look at various cms features:
[opensourcecms.com...]
[cmsmatrix.org...]
I like Mambo, but they change it too often and the next version just-around-the corner is always a major overhaul. Once it is available, they basically abandon the old ones and as security issues pop-up you are forced to update whether you like it or not.
It's hard enough to guide one webmaster at a client to prevent penalties, moderate changes, avoid problems. With an open source CMS, you need to impress SEO values onto literally dozens of "core developers", many of whom already think that SEO means allow mod-rewrite.
- It was too complicated for my application (overkill).
- There aren't too many pre-made templates...I found it kinda hard to customize.
I am hoping to try out Drupal next.
Mambo CMS also has a wonderful community where you might be able to fin solution to most of your problems. I would recommend you to look into mambo again. Also with any new software or script, there is always going to be a small learning curve, and based on my experience I would say Mamabo is one of the easiest to learn.
About Templates, If I am not mistaken, the template set for Mambo consists of mainly 2 files, 1 CSS and 1 Main template file. With little knowledge of HTML, you should be able to create a new template in less than an hour, and if you wish to make changes in the core of the code, it is an open source system and also have a good community that might also be of good use for you.
Mambo down the road, but for now I went with WordPress. I had not only search engine friendly URLs for the archives within seconds, but search engine friendly page titles as well - at the beginning of the title instead of the site name. Also took a few seconds with a simple upload of a plug-in, and even I could get in and make the simple change to the PHP in the template, it's that simple. It also takes nothing more than uploading a couple of files to change the whole look of the site and changing simply the name of the stylesheet used in the template.
It's only a blog script, but it looks like it will be fairly simple to extend the functionality, though it doesn't come close to a full-fledged CMS. The template is so un-intimidating that I'm tempted to give it a try myself for creating static pages for other purposes.
sun818, I'll be trying the one you recommended on another site, it looks very promising.
yes Wordpress is great for blogs, but it is not a CMS. You may not need a CMS (multiple authors, role-based authentication for publishing, link management with ranks, etc) and may appeciate the features of blogs (blogrolling, friend of a friend, crhonological posting, etc). But be careful - there are many issues with either system.
As with Mambo, Wordpress is rapidly evolving. I follow wordpress development, and the new version (soon) is very different than 1.2 (available verson). That is the nature of Open Source.
I have optimized WordPress... you can change from date-centric to topic centric (who wants dates in h1 tags?), easily alter page design via one index file and the CSS to get meta data out of the way (default gives you Google snippets with date/timestamp stuff and very little keyword content). I even optimize the CSS tags, which was kind of cool to do. Virtually all of this will be thrown out with an update to the new version, however.
Also beware that you will encounter duplicate penalty with blogs. As mentioned Mambo allows multiple entryways to content, resulting in duplicate content at several diferent URLs. Blogs generate archives. Each type of archive... and there are many autogenerated -- chrono monthly, individual, categorical -- is duplicate content and is penalized as such in the serps. Seems ok if you are very traditional, since time-since-modified is maintained, but with SEO optimizing based on SERPS you really have to keep on top of every copy change dates, or play with it to optimize linked higher PR pages. It gets messsy.. not sure if it is worth it .. might be best to noindex much of it, and selectively capture output to static files you optimize manually.
If you look at plug ins and extensions, blog systems appear to approach CMS's in functionality. However, plug-ins and extensions are worse than the main sw when it cmes to updates... very fickle, as maintenance is irregular.
A Mambo core developer is publishing a commercial product "SEF Advance", said to make Mambo "search engine friendly". Unfortunately it is simply a mod-rewrite mapping of Mambo's basic category/story structure and is not very SE friendly at all. In my opinion based on their own demo installation and the mamboserver installation, Mambo with dynamic URLs, query strings and all, is more optimized than Mambo with "SEF Advance".
I have optimized WordPress... <snip> Virtually all of this will be thrown out with an update to the new version, however.
So why upgrade? That's another advantage of open source - you don't have to follow any forced upgrade path.
I have a heavily-modified WordPress 1.0 installation running on one site that will not be updated to any later version - I had to remove features even from the 1.0 code, so there is nothing I need in the newer versions (I'm using it a a very simple CMS so all the blogging-specific stuff has been wiped out).
Everything is well-documented, so you can fix any bugs yourself - I watch for any security updates to the newer versions, check for the presence of the offending code in 1.0 and patch as required - not that I've needed to yet.
sun818 - Contentor looks very interesting!
Why?
1. Hard coded category system. Section-->Category-->Article. This posed major problems because 1/2 my sites were too BIG to fit in this structure and 1/2 my sites were too SMALL too fit in this structure
2. No user permission system
3. Only one XML syndication for the entire site
4. HUGE changes between versions, every single dam version all my URLs would change and even my entire site structure.
5. Lack of features as part of Core Mambo. This is one of the most annoying things. You can pretty much do everything with Mambo because there are so many 3rd party stuff avaliable, HOWEVER, TRUST me, next version or even next week there will be an upgrade and than ALL your 3rd party add-ons wont work anymore. I've spent more than $100 on Mambo add-ons that became unsupported and USELESS because the guy selling it got bored and moved onto another project.
6. SLOW DEVELOPMENT. Mambo develops like a snail. Now, I'm not blaming the developers, they work during their free time and you goota love them for that. But when there is a bug or error that needs to be fixed, I want some guy to be working from 9 to 5 on it and am willing to pay good money to have that.
I finally ended up making a list of all the features I wanted and found the CMS that had the most of what I needed, which turned out to be articlelive...
yes Wordpress is great for blogs, but it is not a CMS.I've got to take issue with that statement. I run a bunch of sites off MovableType, which is fairly similar to WP if not a bit more robust. These sites are not blogs, and they don't use any of those blog-like archiving schemes for the files which you say incur duplicate penalties...These are just plain old static websites. MT is what I use to Manage the Content. The client can make changes or add pages via a web interface. There are enough permissions built into the system so that I can protect the site design while still allowing authors the ability to manipulate content. I'll admit that there probably aren't as many checks and balances built into the system as Mambo, but this certainly is a CMS.
Regards
Henry
So why upgrade? That's another advantage of open source - you don't have to follow any forced upgrade path.
Encyclo... if you are saying that you know the code good enough to employ a patch when there is a security announcement, then good for you; but that is way beyond most human capablity. When a security breech is announced, it is hours before the crackers are scanning for software signatures that identify a product installation. Your customized version will likely still be detected as an installation, and is thus a target. Like I said, if you can patch it as fast as the developers can, well you are amazing.
I'll admit that there probably aren't as many checks and balances built into the system as Mambo, but this certainly is a CMS.
Bill - that's the rub. A "CMS" today has those additional features. I can't argue that a system that lets you manage content isn't a "content management system" but the term CMS has now taken on a more specific meaning. To compete in the CMS space today you have to have alot of features that blogs do not have.
Just like Mambo is a CMS and not a portal - you can build a portal with a CMS but many portal systems aren't CMS systems (by today's definition). Some might think it's splitting hairs or semantics but when you get into it there are valid reasons (and changing every week it seems).
