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Yes, links from high-ranking traffic increases a site's overall ranking. What I don't know, is if Google only considers the domain name or the complete URL when caculating rankings. And whatever you do, Google just hates when you use certain CMS systems, such as Mambo: my travel blog, which has been online for two years, cannot be found using any of the keywords that appear in the content. Not that I care (it was meant for my family, and it's in French...). For my company site I'm using hand-coded PHP and its ranking is much better.

I hope they factor in the practical flexibility of a given CMS. I've tried Drupal, Typo3, and Mambo/Joomla. With all of them, you can usually tell which CMS a site uses, e.g. a Drupal site looks like a Drupal site. This is less true for Typo3 and Mambo/Joomla, I think, but admittedly I no longer have any Drupal sites set up (just Typo3 and Mambo, as far as OSS CMS software goes).

And let's talk about average users and training. The Typo3 interface is very frustrating to most of my end-users. Mambo, on the other hand, is much simpler and more streamlined. It doesn't have quite the flexibility of Typo3, but it also doesn't require learning a whole new scripting language (TypoScript) just to get simple things done.

So, though it may be construed as n00b and insufficiently geeky for Slashdot, I'd vote for Mambo... or perhaps Joomla but I haven't upgraded yet.

Admittedly this is not exhaustive, but... all of the open source CMSs I've tried have too many "community" features that need to be disabled for use in a professional environment. This is just frustrating. Is there an OSS CMS that just focuses on kick-ass content management and doesn't care about letting users contribute stories, or running discussion forums, or the like?

If you are going to go the route of hosting a CMS somewhere there are a number of other open source, CMSes that are also free, and are not limited in the same way Community Server Express is.

My favorite is Drupal, as I've had lot's of experience using it, and I find it gives you the biggest feature set for your effort. The number of plug ins (modules) are extensive, and the end user experience can be whatever you want it to be. There are many Drupal hosting sites available that are fairly inexpensive, and have the shell of your community already configured. You just drop in your customizations and away you go.

Mambo is also quite useful if you're looking for an 'out of the box' 'set it up in 20 minutes and walk away' solution. I don't prefer it as much as the extensibility seems limited to me and it has some interesting quirks that seem a bit counter intuitive, but that may just be my inexperience.

There are many other CMSes out there, these are just two I have used/contributed to.

One additional comment : i find that picking a platform and setting up the technology is the easiest part of a project like this. The harder part is getting your family to use it!! ;)

I care, but unfortunately certain browser developers don't give a rat's ass, so attempting to get a page to render perfectly in ALL major browsers without being ultra-conservative and without having to rely on browser hacks like quirks mode or conditional comments is not an easy task.

Furthermore, many open source projects generate HTML output that is so far from compliant that it's easier to just give up and rely on quirks and conditional comments to make things work, in comparison to spending the many man-weeks it would take to fix rendering problem of the various modules and plugins one would often use in conjunction with those projects.

There's a worm currently in propagation that affects unpatched Mambo 4.5.3.x installs. Unknown if the precise worm affects Joomla, however I do note a concurrent "security release" of Joomla as well. The worm compromises via SQL injection, and opens the error_log on all virtual hosts on a given server, in an attempt to obfuscate the true source of the error. Meanwhile, the worm launches a perl process and begins portscanning and attacking other hosts -- it also googles to find new sources for infection. Compromised servers check in at a predetermined IRC room/server.

Official Release on Mamboserver.com.

I would strongly advise getting your site patched circa now.

Hmm. Why is Shawn Carey, who posts news items to the official Mambo website labelled as Anonymous Coward when submitting this story? Hover over the link, that's his email address. A bit suspicious that an interested party is submitting stories as Anonymous Coward, don't you think?

Mambo is the name of an opensource CMS http://www.mamboserver.com./ You would think these guys get out on the net and do a little research before naming a product.

Mambo is the name of an opensource CMS http://www.mamboserver.com./ You would think these guys get out on the net and do a little research before naming a product.

It's not a bias. It's realism. Development of Mambo in Miro seems to be non-existent and this project hardly has any future... Look at this:

Due to the recent departure of the old dev team, the programming team at Miro will continue with the development of Mambo in the interim period. We are actively recruiting for members of the community who would like to contribute as developers and moderators, and all other areas of Mambo. Should you be interested, please email info@mamboserver.com."

source: http://www.mamboserver.com/

Mentioning the fact that mambo (open source) actually beat Firefox 1.0.5, Linux Terminal Server Project and IBM's Derby 10.1 to the Best Open Source Solution award would have made this review slightly less incomplete.

Which Mambo? The open source version or the corporate version by Miro?

Also consider Mambo as another CMS in the same league.

To be honest its the first one that has really impressed me. I looked at slashcode, scoop, zope, plone, postnuke, mambo.

When I started using drupal I got the same feeling as when I started using Mac OS X. To continue the OS analogy postnuke and phpnuke are more like windows whereas zope and plone are kinda linux of the CMS world.

I just moved my website, GoRobotics.net (website about robotics) to Mambo.

How does Drupal compare to Mambo?

Certainly could. But I've never heard about the Mamboserver project ( http://www.mamboserver.com/ ) before. But they dont claim to be leading in the CMS business, just among the most powerful *shrug*

For an easy-to-use site, you want a content managment system. Hands down, mambo, found at http://www.mamboserver.com/ is the best and most flexable CMS around.

What you need is a CMS! Mambo is very easy to install, easy to learn and does all you need.

Oh, and for hosting I recommend OpenHosting, of course!

As usual there are some people who have to keep repeating the same stupid idea's.
Frames CAN be useful e.g. I made a management module a while ago with a javascript tree. If frames didn't exist that would mean the tree would have to be regenerated every time you click on an item. Without frames the app would have been slower and would have used a lot more resources.
Frames (iframes especially) are a great way to create a very dynamic web application without having to reload the whole page and waste bandwidth, processor time, ...
Or how did you think Gmail checked for new messages every $blah seconds. Other great examples of the use of frames are w3chools' tryit-editor or realtime previews of html used in CMSystems such as mambo

Like most people I greatly dislike websites that use frames form navigation menu etc. However just because something is often misused that doesn't mean we should ditch it altogether (no matter what Jacob fucking Nielsen says).

One of the reasons I liked Mambo is because even though it is not required to have "powered by mambo" in the footer, the Mambo team encourages it (no.5) and it does seem well, proper, to do so.

I don't know but I strongly encourage people to use mambo.

Have you tried Mambo by any chance? There is an ecommerce module for Mambo available as well.

Anyone care to comment on which might be a better ecommerce platform to start with?

I think it could mean more people will begin to use Mambo and other free CMSs to put up a website.

Idunno, I kinda like the name Hula. It'll fit well with the Mambo content management system.

Find a web host online that has PHP, MySQL and will autointall scripts for you. One such good one is http://secure.lunarpages.com/tracking/cgi-bin/clic kthru.cgi?id=mnewbe2 Purchase Webspace Login and click the Mambo installer button. Done - You Now have a PHP/ MYSQL Web Site Or you can just install Mambo yourself http://mamboserver.com/ That is my suggestion for a QUICK way to do it.

I'm currently in the process of converting my school's site to Plone. It's easy to install and use. However, it is its own server, so if you just want to run a php application on top of Apache, I would reccomend something like Mambo or Typo3

You can try Mambo or Typo3. They are both great.

But before making a decision, you can check OpenSourceCMS for demo of diferent CMS'. Another great comparison site is CMSMatrix

Dreamweaver is an impressive behemoth of a tool, no doubt whatsoever. Back in 1999/2000 it was the only possible way to edit and manage websites on a professional level. Dreamweavers wysiwyg power with the older browsers and it's HTML editing features are unmatched. The template engine completely abstracts changes to a website in your developement directory and automatically keeps track of anything you what across multiple documents. If DW doesn't crash and screw up your template dir that is - which does happen more often than you like. It's the best thing you can use ... ...if you don't have a CMS.
Which gets me right to the point:
Sorry, but it's like five years since the early dot-bomb days where dynamic server side stuff was considered exotic and people got payed for klicking static websites together. You may haven't noticed, but the world has moved on. There are something like fifteen bazillion open source content management systems out there. One better than the next.
Who the fuck needs DW nowadays? You don't want DW! DWs concepts are ancient by todays standards. The last time I used it was about 4 years ago in some project where the system team couldn't get their stuff together and set up a halfway decent JSP framework and we had to hack the webdocs by hand in record time. And my web productivity has tripled by now, since I exclusively use content management systems (as every body else does), and be it "only" to generate the html docs offline and publish the output to static webspace.

Honestly now: Ditch DW allready, it's nothing but a huge waste of time these days. Trust me, I make a living with this stuff. And take a look at one of the frameworks above. To save your time, I recommend checking out one of the following: Plone/Zope, Callisto CMS, Mambo, Typo3, Mason, Slashcode, or (forgot this one above) Xoops. Save yourself half to three quarters of webdev time in the long run.
Oh, and welcome to 2005. ;-)

I'd recommend the mambo content management system. It's template based (there are loads to download to get you started), it's expandable via modules, to add calendars, forums, document management, news articles, etc. Simple to get up and running for just about anyone. I set it up as our new company intranet, and after a few days it was being administered and populated by the HR dept (very much non techies ;-)

It's also reputedly faster than Plone, and written using PHP, so it's simpler to mate it with other LAMP projects (I've modified our install pretty heavily to link it to our other backend systems).

I've always written sites from scratch with Perl, PHP, DHTML and Java, but I'll almost certainly be using Mambo as the basis of my next few sites... Very impressed ;-)

WEB Based business tell them to try mambo or try oscommerce or if neither of those seem to work have a look at this site. I do not spend any time or money at a site that looks as if it is thrown together by Uncle Joe Bob.

That doesn't work, tragically.
I was hacking an irritating module for Mambo the other day, that I knew had specified somewhere in one of the files a background colour, rather than using the overall Mambo template like its supposed to. Peeking at the HTML source I found the hex code for the colour. Figured rather than opening each document and doing a find, I'd do a search for all 'files and directories' that contained that HEX string. No joy. As far as WinXP could figure, that string didn't exist, even though I've got indexing turned on on the drive.
In the end I opened all the files in Textpad and used its 'find in all files' method to dig out the annoying line of code.

It's fairly well known in the web development community (espessially among php developers) that PhpNuke is a horribly designed piece of software. I haven't looked at in a while, but it looks to me like the foundation of everything is flawed, and thus there are tons of security holes. It's basically at the point that PhpNuke is the Windows of the CMS world (take that however you want).

I personally hate most CMS, because they're almost always created in the same pattern: design small CMS to post news articles, expand till it's doing the whole site, realize that your structure isn't flexible enough, continue modifying until you have something that is upgradable on your existing structure but that ALMOST gets the flexibility you need. I've been there - I had a very nice CMS at an old job during the .com that had been redesigned once already, and was about to be totally overhauled again to be based entirely on the concept of "blocks" - each page would be constructed of them. Add a header block, then a news listing block. If you wanted to, you could use multiple blocks on one page (ie, a file download section, and a forum). Unfortunately, that was when the company became a dot bomb, and I never got to finish it.

The best CMS I've come across so far is Mambo. It's design is relatively good, and it's interface is fairly nice. It does suffer from the same growing pains syndrome as the rest (ie, it has "components" and "modules" - components make up the bulk of a page, modules can be added along the side, or top/bottom). They're starting to merge them now so there's less of a difference - but again, it really should be designed that way from the ground up.

..but for some reason I can't shake the notion that this is all but a publicity stunt from the Mambo people. Consider this:
1) Mambo isn't the end-all OSS CMS. It's just another drop in the Bucket of a bazillion other Open Source Content management Systems based on PHP and MySQL. And not the best one I might add.
2) The Mambo Site looks cool. These people aren't your usual OSS developers, they are professional designers with a company. The Sites professionality is the single largest reason Mambo has gained that much attention amongst Webbers (in comparsion to other free (beer+speech) CMSes). From the begining it clearly showed: The Mambo Maintainers are top of the line when it comes to advertising and generating interest for their OSS project.
3) The claims are hilariously silly and the code of this incident is so simple it hurts. It takes anyone with more than two braincells less than five minutes to figure out a work around if somebody starts getting pissy with the dev-community. No need what-so-ever to offer a weak spot to some idiot causing trouble.

Say what you want, but to me it all figures.
It could be that the claims of this guy actually came in. Once and with a batch of E-Mails - maybe. But I see nothing indicating that he was dragging this to court. No, I actually just see the Mambo people making the best of this little ego-stroking: A publicity stunt.

Good thing they didn't provide a link to www.mamboserver.com, as that would certainly get the server slashdotted.

They provided links all over the place, and many of them to boot, but I find it strange that they link to everyone involved in the story but Mambo. Sure am glad they didn't link to www.mamboserver.com, which just happens to be the official site of Mambo.

innocent smile.

Good thing they didn't provide a link to www.mamboserver.com, as that would certainly get the server slashdotted.

They provided links all over the place, and many of them to boot, but I find it strange that they link to everyone involved in the story but Mambo. Sure am glad they didn't link to www.mamboserver.com, which just happens to be the official site of Mambo.

innocent smile.

Mambo in the middle at close second place, MUCH better than Post-Nuke and Xaraya. Their main website hasn't been doing too bad handling the traffic as of this post, so I guess we'll see how it is by the end of the day.

Nice. I just ran across a site that doesn't work in Firefox and emailed the admin contact, in similar fashion. It was a nice discourse and they said they would ensure cross-browser compatibility. The funny footnote is that they are basing their site on Mambo which is an Open Source project which renders great in linux/firefox. I don't know how they managed to break it.

Though it's aimed more at CMS's rather than blogs, it's definatley a great place to try out multiple CMS's before installing them.

Check it out - OpenSourceCMS

My current favorites:
Mambo
Wordpress
E107
and last but not least Geeklog

A merit of http://www.opensourcecms.com/ is the
categorization : it's important to distinguish generic ("portal") CMSs from just weblogs engines,
and other variants. Though -of course- there's no clear cut-off.

I've been making some research recently.
I wanted an open weblog engine (perhaps with some light cms features), in php+mysql (for ubiquitousness), with good internals (decent code and developer docs).

Among the heavyweigth CMSs -escaping from the horrible mess of PhpNuke and sons- I looked at Mambo, Xaraya and XOOPS ; all of them are really interesting; but too complex beasts for my needs.

Drupal (a generic CMS with weblog included) deserves consideration: nice developer docs, carefully organized coding base and very active. But I dont like the concepts it uses ("nodes","taxonomy"), the templating strategy and the focus in general (a CMS too abstract, I feel).

On the other side, on the KISS weblogs engines, Wordpress has gained a lot of attention. And I liked it overall.
BUT: the code is rather immature and poorly organized and the docs are terrible. Lots of poor software design choices, both at maintainability and performance aspects(yes, guys; I know it's just PHP, but even then... lots of globals, nearly no classes, plugins bad integrated, etc)

I finally choose Nucleus. It beats WP largely in software design and documentation. A minus: it's weak activity (compared with wp and others): a year from the last stable release (2.0). But it's alive, has a decent forum, 3.0RC released this month; and going in the good direction IMHO.

I used Dreamweaver for a long time, as it was convenient and relatively easy (and the library and template features were nice).

Unfortunately, the problem is that, as others have noted here, using such corporate comforts protects you from doing things the right way.

I think what you should be thinking about is a content management system, wherein your content is easily editable (live and online) and the system makes you work with templates in the right way (i.e., using CSS). For my current job, I wound up rolling my own CMS, using PHP for the front end and to generate HTML, and MySQL to keep track of templates. For a live content editor, I'm using Ephox, which is a great product but costs a pretty penny. I started out with Spaw, but it doesn't generate XHTML and can only be used in IE.

There are a ton of CMSs out there -- I just found that most of them were overkill for my website. (And the open source ones generally use IE-centric products for live content editing.) Just go to sourceforge and search for "CMS". Mambo is one of the better ones I've seen.

Oh, and I second the nomination of Crimson Editor as a good programmer's text editor. (Free, as in beer.) For CSS, I use Top Style (not free, but excellent).

If you're comfy with Perl and want to hack extensively, MT is the natural choice. You can make it do damned near anything you want without hacking, of course (via plugins), but sometimes it's fun to mess around under the hood. Oh, and you can avoid the comment-spam problems you mentioned via a number of plugins.

If you prefer PHP, I'd say try Mambo (with a nice polling function built in) or Wordpress (which gets props because it produces valid XHTML/CSS and is clean, clean, clean on the admin interface.

Best advice: go to Open Source CMS and play around. They have default installs of a lot of CMS/blogging systems, and even let you play with the admin interfaces. Very helpful, all in all.

Mandatory plug for my MT-based weblog, here.

Your arguments are great but they apply for almost every lanugage I know of.

As for frameworks look at apache. Have you seen how many frameworks it has for java? What about Swing, AWT, SWT etc? Just because they're are lots of frame works doesn't mean it bad.

I agree with your class as a static function library but that's not PHP's fault. C++, Java and Perl have the same problem. When people learn C or VB first and then go to an OO langauge they generally get it wrong.

As for bad projects I sure if you did an "Ask Slashdot" they'd be able to tell you about bad projects C, C++, Lisp, PHP, Java, J2EE, .NET, etc.

As for a standard was of seperating logic from content lots of people say that JSP isn't enough that's why you have stuff like Velocity and all the other framework template engines. If you want a template engine for php the default one is Smarty.

When it come down to it the problem you have with PHP is that it has a lot of newbie programers that use it. Which is good and bad. Try making a simple form in JSP then do the same thing in PHP. PHP is ALOT easier. That doesn't mean it's better but it does mean people with a lower skill can do it. I'm using templates for our internal site and when other people edit it half the time the escape and got back to raw PHP and it's a mess so I fix it up and it's all clean again but they just don't get it untill after I show them then it make sense and they can do it but the next time they can't figure it out so it happens again etc.

Does it mean you get lots of bad half baked libraries YES does it mean you get good libraries and frameworks YES (because more poeple start, so more people get good at it).

If you want to look at good php projects check out:
* Smarty
* Mambo
* Gallery
* phpBB
* JpGraph
* phpMyAdmin

That being said at what level do you move someone from a "HTML + PHP Hack" to a "Web Developer"?

What makes a lanuage "enterprise-ready"? Does an "enterprise" company just have to use it (IE Yahoo and PHP). Or does it have to have faetures?

Where I work we still use PROC and PIC which is a 40 year old language that doesn't have:
* Variable Names - Only numbers!
* Functions - Only GOTO and GO SUB (again numbers no names)
* All variables are global!
* No loops!
* No else - You have to use IF and GOTO!

Yet this is still being used in thousands of companies all over the world! Sure it's legacy but it's enterprise ready and still being used!

So could it be used on a massive site handling 1,000 of concurrent users? Yes, IF IT WAS DESIGNED IN THE RIGHT WAY. It wouldn't be the same design as you'd use for .NET or the same as you'd use for J2EE but it would work. It might not be the best but that depends on the problem. (Same as Clusters vs Grid)

I've ranted engough ... have fun pulling my comments to peices.

I think Yahoo! would object to being described as a small site. Devshed network runs on a slightly customised version of the Mambo Open Source CMS (PHP/MySQL).

Lilypond: A great open source music notation program.

Cinepaint: Painting and retouching.

CDex: CD Ripper and converter.

Panda 3d: 3D rendering engine.

Mambo: Content management

Gordian Knot:DivX/XviD encoding

Helix: Media player

7 Zip: Zip

It took me all of 2 minutes with Google trying to find links for all the software you mentioned - and greatly enriches your post.

Other than that, thanks for the pointers.

====

ImageMagick

K3b - DVD/CD burner software

Plone - The most mature open source CMS.

Mamboserver - Not as mature or featurefull as Plone, but very nice as well.

OfflineIMAP - Simple, reliable, powerful

Kstars - and KDE Technology in general

The ones that are almost there but could use a hand to make them more intuitive:

GNUCash - Can't wait for their Gtk2 version.
Mr. Project
KOffice - has a great technological underpinning.

Mambo isn't bad. It's certainly pretty simple to use. opensourceCMS has an example of it.

I've been investigating Mambo - it's opensource, content can be managed without programming knowledge, and all sorts of modules, such as threaded forums, blogs, etc are available (not sure about photo albums though). Same sort of backend as others that have been discussed, PHP/mySQL/apache.

I've had a tour of the administration site for my friend's mambo install, and it sure does look sweet...

Pixie

Depends on what you want:

The best CMS for actually making websites that I know of is Mambo on the other hand it sounds like you don't want that.

If were going for simple I'd have to say I haven't found anything that better than Gallery for pictures. You then need to figure out if you want a Website or a Blog. I haven't used many blogs but you if you want easy webpages use a Wiki

Hope you find what your looking for though.

I've been evaluating similiar solutions myself and found that TUTOS and dotproject (both from souceforge) were too incomplete to really meet my needs.

So instead I've been evaluating Content Management Frameworks or Content Management Systems which can easily be adapeted for this use. So Far I've looked at:

Mambo Open Source Which I have found to look and feel great, easy to use, modify, but too lightweight to really meet a project portals needs without significant modification.

Zope
and the CMS based on Zope called Plone
Which I found can fit the bill, but the learning curve is extremely high and may have too much complexity for easy extension development or modification.

Currently I am looking at
Typo3 which seems to fit the bill for both sophistication yet ease of use and extension. However, it doesn't have an extension yet (that I'm aware of) for CVS or a similiar version control system (Would be interested to know if there is one?)

Great resources to check for Open source project management/CMS solutions:
Open and Free Project Management tools
Open Source CMS - Try before you by! with lots of online demo sites available.

Good luck! Follow up with what you decide to use please!