Book Image

Learning Mambo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website

Book Image

Learning Mambo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website

Overview of this book

Mambo is a mature and fully featured open-source Content Management System (CMS). Mambo is easy to use at the entry level for creating basic websites, while having the power and flexibility to support complex web applications. Mambo implements the core requirements of a full-featured CMS. It has a powerful and extensible templating system, user access control, content approval, rich administrative control, and content display scheduling. New features and extensions are added to the core system, with many more being available and supported by the community. This book targets the 4.6 release of Mambo, and takes you through creating an example website. Beginning with a discussion of the requirements for the example site, the site unfolds as you progress through the chapters, learning more about Mambo, and how to complete the tasks needed to build the site. You'll see the basic configuration options for setting up your site, and learn about Mambo's main elements as you work your way around its web-based administration area. As soon as you're familiar with the general principles and behavior of Mambo, it's time to pile on the features for your site; adding modules and components, uploading images and other resources, and managing templates. You will learn to use Mambo's powerful Universal Installer to effortlessly install add-ons that are not part of the standard distribution. The pages on your site, how they are displayed, and who can see them, are determined by Mambo's menu system. With many examples of the different types of menu items, the book will lead you through the important tasks of creating menu items, and help you understand how these choices structure the pages on your site and ease your visitors' navigation. You will see how to organize and enter your content into Mambo, and how to manage and edit this organization and your pieces of content. As we tackle user management, you will see how Mambo allows you to set up user accounts with different permissions, including a set of special users who can author or edit content. We also take a detailed look at the notifications that occur when content is submitted by these users. This analysis reveals how the Mambo publishing workflow process works, and how you can exploit it effectively. Moving on from the standard Mambo features, we look at some third-party extensions that add powerful discussion forum, event scheduling, and image gallery features to your site. To create a new look for your site, you create a new template. We cover this, and even if you're no expert in web design, you will be taken through a number of basic tasks to create an impressive new design for your site.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Mambo : A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Installing XAMPP

Chapter 1. An Introduction to Mambo

Mambo is a free tool to manage the content of dynamic websites. To be more specific, Mambo is an open-source content management system. While that sounds nice, it probably doesn't answer the basic question of what it can actually do for you.

Mambo allows you to create a dynamic website with minimum effort and programming knowledge. To get the most out of Mambo, a knowledge of web development will prove to be useful, but even then, Mambo is written in the PHP scripting language, which is probably the most popular and straightforward language for creating websites and web applications.

In this chapter, we will take our first look at Mambo, understand what it can do, find out where to go for further resources, and discuss the site we will create in this book.

What Mambo Can Do for You

Put simply, Mambo helps you create websites easily. It provides a back end, a control area if you like, from where you add content and information to the site, configure the way things look, and also create a front-end public view of your site.

Maybe you want to create a site about wine making, flowers, programming, zombie films, or even dinosaurs. Maybe you want to create a site to promote your business and your products. Whatever type of site you want to create, Mambo helps you to structure the site to hold information relevant to your visitors; be it news stories about a forthcoming zombie film, links to other zombie sites, or even a gallery of stills from zombie films.

The best bit is, you don't have to be an expert programmer to achieve all this. With only rudimentary knowledge of HTML, you can engineer a unique-looking Mambo website, packed with the information you want for your site and your visitors.

The Visitor Experience

The standard installation of Mambo provides many features for its visitors. Some of them are:

  • Searchable content items (articles) organized into groups

  • Ability of visitors to create an account on the site, and log in to their own personal area

  • Ability of visitors to add comments about articles

  • Straw polls

  • A catalog of web links

  • RSS syndication of your articles to share your content with other sites

That's just some of the features of the standard installation. With a couple of clicks, you can install new features on the site, such as:

  • Discussion forums

  • Galleries of images

Mambo can be customized and extended easily, and there is a huge range of third-party customizations and extensions to be found on the Internet. Any of these can add to the range of features your site provides.

The Management Experience

As a potential 'manager' of a Mambo site, as you read through the list of features above, you may think they sound rather attractive, but might also wonder how you will handle all of that.

Mambo provides a web-based management interface. You, as the manager of the site, visit the site and log in with a special super user, or site administrator, account. After this, from the comfort of your web browser, you run the show. You can:

  • Add new information, edit, delete, or move existing pieces of information

  • Control how the site will look

  • Decide the features of the site

  • Add media (documents, images, sounds) directly to the site

  • Control what is displayed on the pages

  • Control who is able to see what

In fact, you don't need to do all of this yourself. You can set up accounts for other people to take over the running of various parts of the site, maybe adding or checking content, or maybe just making sure everything runs smoothly.

The power and flexibility Mambo offers you to manage a complex website would be difficult to achieve without many, many hours of careful programming.