Battleangel | Personal

Mambo is steaming towards its next major milestone which is 4.5.1. Release Candidate 3 was uploaded a couple of days ago and the final version is just around the corner now.

Even though I don’t use Mambo myself I can’t help but wish I did. At the end of the day, Nucleus probably gets the job done, but not with the same sense of flair and grandeur.

I am however using Mambo to power the new site over at Pang Musik, which supposedly will be completed within a week. The constant jumping from Release Candidate to Release Candidate is kind of numbing but it’s worth it. Staying up to date with the latest developments and rummaging thru the code is the only way to learn how it operates. It’s a bit contradictory that even with this leading CMS one still has to hack the code and know a deal of PHP. But then again it’s up to the user to decide. Maybe I’m just nitpicky.

Right now, my biggest concerns are legacy modules and components. Dropped functions, rearranged paths and variable handling has already killed off quite a few 3rd party scripts.
And as big as Mambo is, there are still a few things missing. A REALLY good photo gallery for example, one that works a bit like Coppermine. The actual Coppermine component doesn’t seem like happening anytime soon.

I have to share a rather stupid install mistake that I did also. Lazy as I am, I fired up GetMambo. Only problem is that it somehow sets ownership to god-knows-who-or-what, most likely “nobody” with my particular host. The result is that even though Mambo is running fine, it is impossible to replace files using FTP. Only solution is to delete a file and then re-upload it. Will remedy this once 4.5.1 Final is available. Took me three RCs to figure out.