As noted earlier, there’s an AAUW partner offering free Mambo-based sites, so I thought I’d check that out. From a few hours worth of investigation (see ncwu.sgtst.com/cms) Mambo’s both more powerful and less elegant than Wordpress.

There’s a rich set of add-ons. But you need an add-on to get commenting functionality though they do call one of their “views” a “blog”. There’s a Dreamweaver extension to create Mambo templates — though they seem to be table based, while the ones I’ve looked at in Wordpress use CSS positioning.

It took an hour or so to find the right problem report about a funky display bug in the Mambot administration that kept me from finding the right editor administration that other reports said was there.

While there’s an RSS feed functionality built in, it seems more awkward than the hosted version I’ve put into this blog (see Open CRS article). With Mambo, in contrast, click Feeds from the main menu, then click a news feed category, and finally click the feed itself to see the current articles. There must be a way to eliminate one or both of those intermediate clicks, but I haven’t found it.

But the thing we may most need to watch with Mambo is that the core development team has separated from Miro, the company that’s been providing support for the project. They’ve started a new project, Joomla!, and it’s not clear whether the old name (http://mamboserver.com/) or the new (http://joomla.org) will win more hearts and minds ….

[Did I tell you I love working in an Open Source environment …]