Joomla! Discussion Forums

We'd love to hear your "come to Joomla! story" (and whatever the new one is called).  How did you find it, what turned you on/off.  However you came across this humble CMS, we'd like to know so please share your story.

Hmm, I was looking for a CMS (as every developer does) and 1st start with of course PHPNuke. I was using that only b/c of the gamers I played with suggested it. If you didn't know, most, if not all, gaming clan sites are made w/ phpNUKE. Not satisfied w/ the performance it displayed, I decided to hunt for others.  I quickly came across Drupal, which look like that was where I was going to begin my journey into the PHP and CMS world. After spending countless post over @ their forums (no disrepect, still a great CMS framework) trying to get it installed, I gave up and found mambo!

...It was love @ 1st site.  Just me and mambo!  Then I realized that I had to share my love with 5 million other PEOPLE!  Somethings are just too good to be true

Anyway, of course I experienced problems w/ my installation and headed to the forums.  15 mins later, I had my 1st mambo site up and running. I read more and more about the community and thought that this would be a great place to learn a thing or two.

I've been using mambo since sept 2004.  I didn't know any PHP or anything about CMS'.  Now, I know a lot more about the two subjects, and mostly due to the folks @ the mambo forums, and my determination to do something w/ this project.

Unfortunately, u guys are stuck w/ me.  I love the mambo project and hope to see it get as far as it can go!

Ok here we go.

I first came to mambo around 2 1/2 years ago  after looking for one of these 'Content Management Systems' that i had heard a lot about from other people. I was looking for a package that I could implement for a clients site that would be easy for them to understand (not being tech litterate) and to modify as they needed. It also needed to have a component/integrate with a great shopping cart solution (as they had around 3000 products that needed to be made available).

From there i have developed quite a few sites for small businesses and non-profit organisations (around 10 or so) and have proudly displayed they mambo logo and links as i thought/think it is a awesome package.

Now what turned me on and off.

First off i found mambo quite easy to install and operate although i did struggle with some of the more intricate and hidden parts of the CMS. Once these loose ends were tied down i came out all guns blazing and really enjoyed the experience.

And basically i'm really glad for all the hard work the community has put in and i hope that this continues and i can help into the future!

In January '04 I was looking for an easier way to do updates to my church's site.  After reading about CMS I went looking and Mambo was the winner.  Now the church staff can handle their own article updates and calendar posts without me.

Since then, I have started building sites for other churches, missions and various Christian related organizations (including a few commercial sites).  I also started a community site for other Christian mambites called....you guessed it....mambochristian.com (soon to be renamed it appears).

This is the greatest open source project of all time in my humble oppinion.  Great work guys, keep it up.

Chris

I have to admit that it is not easy for me to write this reflection, specifically since I am so new to Mambo and I feel like a new driver entering a busy highway the first time.

I learned about Mambo on June 3rd this year in a Starbucks coffeehouse  in New York.  Having to create a new website for a project called PDF4Less, someone recommended Mambo and someone else recommended that Mitch Pirtle can help me.  Mitch was already drinking his Iced Chai tea when I met him at Starbucks in New York.  Being that my background is in document management, it took us 20 minutes to cover all that I needed to know about Mambo.

When we were done, Mitch switched gears and started to talk about the open source community and the core developers – his extended family as he described it.  He shared with me that he and his friends, Andy Miller and Andrew Eddie, decided that it is time to “eat their own dog food,” it's time to start a new company – a company that will support the growing user population and a company that will give back to the open source community. 

He added that even though they are all fathers to small kids, they are willing to risk it all and do what they love to do -- to continue and develop Mambo as part of their day job as well.  Yes, he said, we need to put food on our table so we will have to charge for our services, but as you know Ethan, he added, here in the Wall Street area I can earn 3 times as much working for a financial firm, but I chose to do this.

I did not sleep that night.  After 9/11 here in New York, I felt a dent in my heart and even four years later I can’t shake it off.  But this, learning about this growing open source community and getting to know smart and genuine people, gave me some new hope. 

Mitch and I continued our conversations for a month.  Every week we met at Starbucks and every time a 20 minute conversation turned into three hours.  At one point I spoke with Andy Miller and Andrew Eddie – their views were the same.  In the last week of June, Mitch asked me if I can help.  I felt honored and asked how.  He suggested that I become the CEO of this newly formed company, JamboWorks.  I agreed and started working without pay.  It has been 50 days since I started putting 14 and sometimes 16 hours of work per day.  I’ve spoken with over a hundred people since I started and have  spent many hours reading your wonderful thoughts and genuine concerns. 

Yes, this is all new to me and I am pressing the Send button with shaking finger.  However I am grateful to witness all of this and to be part of this new extended family of mine and I hope that you will accept me as well.

I am a software engineer.  C programming is mostly what I do every day.

Well my daughter got involved with the high school band and loved it.  It is a program that cannot function without voluteer effort from the parents.  And a excellent program it is!

After doing odd volunteer jobs for the first year my wife learned that the then current volunteer Webmaster was leaving the group, his child was graduating.  Knowing I was a computer "geek" and thinking webmastering is computer geek stuff, she volunteered me and I foolishly accepted.

What I inheirited was an excellent website with clean, hand-crafted HTML using minimal CSS.  The first year I had to learn HTML beyond the dabbling stage and did not want to take on a remodel of the site from what it was.  My goal was to just add the new content as needed without breaking anything.  I accomplished that goal but quickly found that maintaining a site that complex in nearly pure HTML was time consuming work!  I knew I needed a CMS, though I did not know what a CMS was it at the time.

I asked my local Linux User Group what to use.  Three recommendations for Mambo popped up right away, two of which offered to host the site for free!  The band already has donated space from an alumus and the Band Booster Board did not want to switch.  Then the wrench in the works hit as I learned the donated space was on a Microsoft server.  My worries were unfounded as I implemented the site over this last summer break and with some help from the community, mostly archives of the forums, I had it up and running by mid-July!

Good points:
- My wife, the photographer for the band, can upload her photos without my assistance crafting special photo pages.  (Zoom Media Gallery is great!)
- For emergency updates to content, I don't have to be home to do it as I can do it from anywhere there is an internet connection.
- Excellent online documentation!  You have no idea how much I was impressed with the popup help at the cursor and the detailed explanations on the help screens.  Superb!
- New content appears when desired and where desired.
- Praise from the Band Boosters, parents and even the techno-savy students!
- Free as in Freedom is great.  Free as in no cost is also great.  Being a volunteer organization the Band Boosters want to spend money to directly benefit the students.  Free Software lets us have a high-class website without a high cost!

Bad points:
- The WYSIWYG editors I have tried so far are not as clean as I would like.  Sometime I want to open parts of the site for others to edit and add content.  But right now I am not confident that the techno-neophite volunteers could handle editor annomollies.  So I and my wife are currently the sole editors.
- Maybe I missed it but I have not found a spell checker yet.  I could use one!
- Customizing templates is not very easy for someone like me that does not really understand PHP or CSS.  It would be nice to have a template editor that lists template properties and lets you change them by choosing.  For example, I really like my current template but I haven't yet figured out how to change it from fixed width to variable.

The HUGE selling point is the community.  Without it, the best code in the world will not fly and with it this project is superb!  I thank the developers and the community for an excellent product!

I found Mambo after working with osCommerce for a few months.

I built a few shop sites for people and I was looking for something for our new startup business.  When I found Mambo it was "Wow!".  The code is great, the community is great - I love the fact that anybody who is prepared to put in a little work and do some reading can have a fully featured dynamic website that doesn't have to look like a Nuke site

What don't I like.....

Not enjoyed the schism of the last week.


This is my favourite open source project - thank you to everybody who makes it what it is

I found Mambo back in August of 2003 when 4.5 was just entering it's beta stages. I was in the middle of trying to write a custom CMS for a site I was working on and got tired of that so I went looking for new systems. Went through the nukes, xoops and typo3 settled on Mambo. I had a custom template put together at the end of my first day working with the system, a huge credit to the simplicity of the system. Very glad I found Mambo as I have formed lasting relationships with great friends and have actually just had my first offline mamber experience.

Hi All,

I found Mambo in october 2003. I was looking/selecting a CMS for my private website. Once I found Mambo I never looked at other CMS solutions. It gave me the option to leave html programming and use the power of a CMS on sites. Found it very user friendly from the start. After creating several sites with it, I also came involved as moderator on the forums. See you around !

I found Miro before they launched Mambo.

I'd been working for a company supplying a sime management / document management system who had opposing opinions as to how they wanted to treat my personal contacts. "Just sell .. don't worry about how long we will be around."  I wasn't for long.

Been using Mambo since day 1. Tried phpwebsite, xoops, phpnuke et al and inspite of these venturings kept on with Mambo.

I got sick of the dependency model with conventional web site development and now work using Mambo as part of communications and marketing systems, business support and intranets.

Lost count of the sites I've been involved with using the tools.

I've got 14 sites up at present with the current version and another 6 on the go at present.

Just formed a new venture with some colleagues servicing a couple of niche areas and servicing Mambo and other OS systems and custom php coding, marketing, design.

yeah Mambo isn't perfect but lets face it life's a compromise. What I love about this place is the community. It is so much more helpful and reponsive, people actually care if you have a go and stuff up and then seek help.

In Nov 03 I was looking for a CMS/article manager that was easy to use for the site owner [as against the tech dept] and that allowed simple frontend access to editors and authors.

I went through the whole of SF.net, it seemed like, till I actually stumbled on a reference to this great codebase in an unconnected forum [postnuke if I mistake not].

Installation was a breeze, issues were sorted sameday via the forum, everything worked great and most importantly the client loved it.

As a designer with low php experience the alterative to hiring a coding team was this and here is where i stayed and will for the forseeable future.

Am now moving my company's network of sites onto this and have already shifted one with the following results -

1. Monthly unique users went from 7,000 to 15,000
2. Bandwidth usage actually dropped inspite of this increase
3. pageviews increased dramatically.

What can I say i just love OSM!!

Back in March of 2002, I started setting up a website for a project my friends and I were doing. ( stupidscifi.com )
At that time, I was trying to do it all by hand with HTML, because that was all I knew. After the first week, I realized that I had to find a better solution, so I started hunting down a CMS. I was lucky enough to stumble on Mambo Site Server, and started asking questions in the forum to see if it would do what I wanted. There was a guy named Robert Castley who seemed to be the main person in the forums, and he was very helpful.

To make a long story short-er, I started using Mambo, and quickly started trying to hack it into doing my bidding. Before this time, I thought that PHP was some kind of illegal drug, but I had no fear and blindly started hacking, tweaking, and fumbling with it until I started to figure it out. (I also cheated and read a little bit of a PHP book  )

Before you know it, I am releasing my own components and modules...which most of you have probably never heard of...things like Wrapper, MyMenu, and a few other silly little things.  I was spending WAAAY too much time in the forums, and WAAY too much time Mambo-ing. But I was loving it!!!! It was like a family, and I looked forward to spending time everyday with my Mambo friends, helping others with there Mambo problems and ideas.

Then, in early 2004, I took a new job traveling the country for a show, and was suddenly removed from my comfy computer chair, and thrown on a tour bus. When I returned from my first 3 month trip, I noticed a lot of things had changed...not only with the Mambo Community, but with me personally...I have not really done much Mambo-ing since.

Until now. 

I think it was about 3 years since I started with Mambo, A web site I was involved with went Mambo and needing a CMS for my new shareware site, it was a bit of a no brainer to learn together.

I soon needed some custom bits and pieces for my site, and so started to learm about modules and components, and I started writing a few for use on my site. But nothing general enough for release. Though I did publish some stuff on Mambo Seo and help a little on forums.

Last year I started downsizer.net, which is a non-profit volenteer based site, and this needed loads more custom modules and components that were actually quite general in nature. A few months ago I found this volenteer work had pushed me quite away from my usual shareware coding, and into a position of desiging/hosting and in possession of a portfolio of useful mambo bits to pass back to the community. So I got me a couple of dedicated servers and have the following mambo sites on them:

http://www.downsizer.net/ - ethical consumption
http://m4webdesign.co.uk/ - web hosting
http://www.mambopower.net/ - mambo module/component downloads.
http://www.sharewaresites.net/ - not pretty but a good resource for shareware authors looking for sites.
http://www.myfreeforum.org/ - lets people set up free phpbb forums.

i was using another open source CMS named Xoops back in 2002 when one of the Xoops devs that I knew turned me on to Mambo. I strated learning to make templates and give back to the growing mambo community, i also was moderator on the templates forums for a long while.

I have been on board for the whole roller coaster ride.

I discovered Mambo about 3 months ago while looking for a database solution for my 23,000 page site http://www.findachurch.co.uk - I know, I should have done this before I started!

While looking at a range of possibilities and others' experiences and recommendations, I kept coming back to Mambo. So, I installed Mambo yesterday and am just sorting through some installation glitches.

I am truly a newbie and very pleased to be part of the OSM community. I have already been able to help someone on the forum, so the community works!

I have  found Mambo about 1,5 year before, I was building site for my friends and we disscuss more about CMS to use it. We start using PHPNuke but after one year we all have the same thought it is not this what we need. All sites loooking almost the same and more inconvenience in use Nuke as an admin. We start to look for new CMS. And then we try xoops and Mambo and our choice was Mambo. When I have finished building it I saw that Mambo has wonderfull all world community and I decide to support it by myself. Start work with Polish translations and to be Polish mod on forum.mamboserver and I am here.

Thanks Andrew and all dev team members for your hard work on this nice CMS and all community too.

Like so many other people, i was managing a handful of rather involved static sites.  I foolishly thought I could build my own style CMS, and managed to get most of one site into a DB, and call it with (very clumsy) php.  THen I thought that was silly, I started looking for a CMS.  Asking around, i was (gently) pushed to Mambo by Brad (thanks mate!).  That was 4.5 1.0.3...  Never looked back. 

It's not perfect, but it's getting better all the time

Basicly, i went from PHPNuke, osCommerce and e107. I think it was after trying out and using them in productions i stumbled uppon "Mambo".

So far, so good

I found Mambo at the London Linux World Expo in 2004. I was looking for a CMS to power our company Intranet. To be honest it was not really Mambo its self that persuaded me but the even then large collection of Components and Modules. The next day I downloaded a copy of 4.5-1.0.9 and began to look around, within a week the company had a new face for information management and it’s been there ever since. Even thought I’m crying out for real ACL support (hint, hint) 

Jason, nice to have you back.

Almost one year ago I was searching for a CMS for one of my school's homepages. Read an article about Typo3, was happy about the easy installation, then I tried to create a template. Typo3 is very well documented but nevertheless it seemed to be much too difficult and complex for my purpose. So I forgot about Content Management Systems for a while, until I read an article about Mambo in the german computer magazine "c't". The example page they used was rather ugly, so I wasn't convinced immediately. 
But as I was still searching for a CMS I decided to give Mambo a try. I downloaded it and after reading a few tutorials I instantly tried to create my own template as none of the others seemed to fit my needs. I was astonished how quick and easy usable results could be archieved and I really liked the admin interface as it wasn't as dry and minimized as the interface of Typo3.

Till this day I've created three sites with mambo, learned a lot, received a lot of help in several forums and after a while I even felt confident enough to help other newbies.

I've never regretted using Mambo although I still have some wishes for improvements and features (as probably everyone has). 

My story and the reason why I have 'defected' over to Mambo are realy simple.

I was up until last Jan this year a very active member of the Xoops Core team and leader of the Module development team over there , but due to the lack of communication between the community and some of the core team members, patches made by community members didn´t flow into the Core, as it works nicely here on currently know as $ambo, i quite this job april and decided to move to this community.

The ability to move on and listen to what their members required, the in Core fighting and backstabbing of some of the core members, also the start of some Core members to make a Oneman Show without remembering what teamwork is, also the bad behaviour against the founder of XOOPS Ono Kazu, critic will get floods of words so at the end nobody knows what the critic was ( this is a great talente of the current Coreteam up there ), made me rethink my position with Xoops. There are quiete a lot more reasons but it is important for me now to have made the break.

I have developed a lot of Modules like the myXoopsForge ( use on the http://dev.xoops.org ) a complete SF Clone as XOOPS Module, have completly rewriten as main developer the newbb to the newbb 2.0 Version ( used on the XOOPS Mainsite ) was involved into the xcgallery ( a Coppermin Gallery Module for XOOPS ) also involved and later main developer of the XOSC ( a osCommerce Module for XOOPS ) continue work on the wf-channel and lot more.

Currently i´m looking deep into the CVS Version from 4.5.3 and starting to build a web hosting Software like modernbill or whm.autopilot, also i´m in touch with the developer of PHPAudit to converte this nice program to a mambo component.

So i hope i can bring my years of experience into $ambo ;-) and to the community, where i found a lot good known XOOPSers and XOOPS friends again and of course new friends .

This is a great open source project and a great coreteam thanks guys for your work, keep it up.

In august 2003  I came across Mambo by accident. I was was working in PHP and making websites and web applications. I liked Mambo from the beginning. The project was reasonably well coded. The structere with modules, components and mambots was excellend for custom enhancement. Last but not least there where a lot of compontent, modules and mambots avaliable.

During the first year I looked alse in other CMS'es, like xoop, drupal, e107 etc. Seeing this projects, I was certain that Mambo was the one for me.

Now seeing al the attention in the media and the awards, I realise what a luck I had in august 2003.

Brilliant to have you here Ethan. I see JamboWorks even had the honour of Miro pointing an accusing conspiracy story finger at JamboWorks for starting an alleged mutiny. If anything, they've probably boosted your profile somewhat. Fact checking and accuracy isn't Miro's forte, so you should give them a little slack if you were offended by their stupidity.

I run a couple of personal websites, mostly based on a blog/news style format. Back in the day before CMS was a common term all editing was done via notepad with raw HTML. It took eons to edit even the simplest of pages. Plus, you had to FTP back and forth constantly always being careful to upload the proper version to your remote server.

After some time I moved to Dreamweaver MX, then DW 2004. Both were quite helpful in speeding up the maintaining of the site, but still allowed only the webmaster (me) to make edits to content. Quite frankly, as powerful as Dreamweaver is, it wasn't a true CMS solution.

From DW I started looking at the various CMS options out on the market. My first stop was the ubiquitous PHP Nuke. Quickly I noticed a lack of centralized support, documentation and other community issues that left a bad taste in my mouth. I had grave concern that if I switched over to Nuke that any problems that might arise would be up to myself to solve. That was not an option.

Dabbling with Typo3, Xoops and other CMS offerings produced similar results in several areas. Even though many of the projects offered powerful functionality, most were poorly documented and not easily configurable to a custom application. 3PD development was scarce at best.

I finally came on board the Mambo project when I found a favorable review of it over at http://www.cmsreview.com. One figures, what's there to lose in downloading and installing an open source project? The few problems that I encountered with the install were quickly answered in the Mambo forums. The community more than anything is why I've stuck with Mambo. The support you get here is second to none.

I have a few gripes with mambo, most of which are aimed at the back end. The static/blog/news etc. content is too complex. All content should be easily changeable at a moment's notice. Want a blog entry to become static content? It should take no more than a few clicks. You shouldn't have to start from scratch. A more robust user manager, contact details page and integration with other systems (IPB, PHPBB, mIRC) would be nice without having to hack the core files.

All in all, despite its shortcomings it is the overall best CMS in the non-commercial class that I've evaluated. The community is friendly and knowledgeable, there is a high level of free and low-cost 3PD modules, the template architecture is straightforward, the developer team is committed and active and last but not least, where else are you going to find a community where everyone puts their real picture for an avatar?

People make Mambo what it is today and I'm honored to be along for the ride. Bravo folks, you get a well deserved pat on the back.

Upwards and onwards, the real meat of the project is just getting started.

Doing some R&D to develop a good web site for my university department and one of my versy close friend told me about mambo. And I become FAN of mambo...exellent effort...

With no web develomement experties, now I may claim my self and web expert...

Well then....

Last year around october I was looking for a CMS for recreating my site which was actually a wordpress-driven blog (which now is more a mambo ressource of tipps&tricks&tutorials and templates: http://www.mademyday.de). I was looking for some more features just for building some additional personal pages. As Usability consultant in a business consutancy in munich, germany I already had something to do with CMS, but most of them were licensed enterprise solutions like reddot etc. But never as a user, alway as tester of the implementation of features. I was really surprised after downloading Mambo (was 4.5.1.), because of the possibilities given to user. I already took a look on Typo3, but with not investing a lot of time each day in learning this complex thing with own programming language it made no sense.

But Mambo was different. Changing the given templates for personal needs was easy, hacking the modules even without PHP-knowledge also not that complicated. After my job was drifting more and more away from internet related topics (which I regretted) and with building mambo sites in my spare time I decided to make a big step: I resigned from my job, although save and well paied. I built an agency for Webdesign & Contentmanagement on first of June (http://www.madeyourweb.com).

In Mambo I see a very good possibility for (yet) small business solutions. All these little companies had built small static sites for lots of money in a time "everyone had to be in the internet". Now, they don´t have a possibility to change their site because the agency isn´t anymore or it is too expensive. They don´t even know what a CMS actually is. Here comes my part. I show them Mambo and what is all possible with that: they can manage their content, build new one, change old one and so on. And all that without paying for a license. My other intention is to show that not every mambo site has to look the same, you can build everything with Mambo.

It was an important and huge step for me, so I´m like many others concerned about the future of this CMS, because it also writes my future...

Greetz Marc

I'm a reporter and I love to publish my own articles to my site. I was searching a great CMS over and over by PHPNuke, E107 and others, 'till I find Mambo at middle of 2003. After that, I just cant get out my head from Mambo for my http://www.dingin.info

I found Mambo about 3+ years ago after getting fed up with the nuke's.  I was using it for my Counter-Strike clan site at the time and loved everything about it.  This was, of course, after testing out every stinking CMS and Portal available out there to make sure this was the right choice.

From there I created a couple of other clan sites for my online friends and then I turned to hosting the sites myself with a small gaming related business.  I created more sites, mostly for clans, and began to really dig into how Mambo worked.  After selling the hosting business, I started up the website Church Ministries Online and that is where I have been since.

GOD BLESS!!

at first i needed a system which would send newsletters to subscribers, i got a host (a small orange) which had fantastico installed, i installed every possible system it had to offer, X00ps, durpal and wordpress not to forget phpnuke,

the final link was $mambo$, as soon as i saw solar flare, that was it, i removed everything else, and kept $mambo$

I wont be choosing another CMS, $mambo$ has everything to offer + the possibility of more


Thanks to the Dev team, the community + all community developers, without u people we wouldnt have this amazing system

NOTE: since i have installed $mambo$ i have encouraged everyone i know to use it, 3 people have converted to $mambo$ the others are a bit scepticale

Thanks again!

Keep up the excellent work, i hope we can all make this a better community, an OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY!!!!!

PS: i have been using it for 3 months