What does Mambo do for me

Bert Vivie · 09.12.2004, 13:13

I am going to rewrite a Website of our local baseball team and looked for so far at Dreamweaver MX 2004, The website is hosted on a PHP and MYSql platform, and is static HTML
I heard about Mambo from an article from my own Provider and got interested by the ease of use of Mambo
But when I read some time on the mambo websites I saw that for Building templates I could use Dreamweaver.
My first Impresion was that Mambo was an all in product why do I have to use dreamweaver also
My question:
What does Mambo do more from me than Dreamweaver alone, because I thought I could do everything I need with mambo
I Am a programmer and know enough from HTML (and jsp) so knowledge is not an issue, from dreamweaver I have a trial version, and because mambo is for free I Hoped I could do all i need with mambo

bobhughe · 09.12.2004, 13:57

I too am a programmer, though I don't care to get into the nuts and bolts of a CMS... and with Mambo you don't need to... that's the beauty of it.

What Mambo does for you is gives you a system that you can let other members of your organization post content.

Isn't that what a Web Presence is about?

Wheter it's a Baseball team, a company, a Family... easily updated content is what it is about in "My Opinion".

Our Family's Page

is my family's page... a couple of news feeds, weather, NY Times, a clock, some links, Buttons to "Make Favorite"... some articles.

The "wrapper" function is "so sweet"... I use it to make a "coppermine" photo alblum part of my site...

The "worse" part of Mambo are the templates... though once you get the hang, it's a non issue...

Find a template that is close to what you want... change out the graphics, change the css's and it's yours.

With DreamWeaver you are creating a site, that you alone will have to maintain... With Mamo you can enlist the help of other folks...

eyezberg · 09.12.2004, 18:09

Mambo is ready to use.
You don't need Dreamweaver to edit it (Notepad is sufficient).
What we have is an extension to be used with Dreamweaver to insert commonly used code blocks into a template where you want your content positioned.
You can design your own template(s) if you want to, but as there are so many free (and commercial) templates available, you don't have to.
As bobhughe said, you could also just use an existing template and modify it to suit your needs.
Using Mambo or not depends really on: will this site be updated regularly? Or is it just a few pages with almost no maintenance work?
If updates are likely/frequent/possibly executed be more than one person with not much web knowledge who need an easy to use interface, go for Mambo.
Baseball team: I suggest looking at CommunityBuilder component, Events also etc.. you can get a great site up in no time with Mambo.

prj · 23.12.2004, 05:05

Its true you don't need dreamweaver but for editing templates it makes life very easy as you can see where the tables, images & PHP tags go and thats all really.

If you use an existing template and just change some or all of the site images and not moving anything or adjusting the layout you don't need DW.

What DW will do is build a static site, what mambo will do is create a powerful interative site which you just add content too. Mambo is power, DW is adds a bit of tweak to that power.

The two are not really comparable.

Just try Mambo and play, you will not want to use DW to create sites guaranteed. Edit bits of Mambo but nothing more.