Here are some coments from a guy who recommends a PHP CMS. Its pretty
critical. How much of this would also apply to FarCry?
(ducks)
The Mambo GPL version descends from a commercial version
See http://www.miro.com.au this version is now called Jango.
Having wrangled with Mambo a lot here's my 2c.
In it's current version it has a number or pro's and cons.
I'll start out by saying IMHO it is the best open source PHP CMS,
It is relatively simple to do simple things; the template system is very
easy (there is even a DW extension for it), and as long as you don't
require
fine grained user access, its multi author system is not too bad. There are
a lot of components/modules/mambots to allow for extra content handling,
(i.e. mosdocs is a good example if you are wanting doc management)
There is also a great Mambo community on mamboserver if you need help.
BUT
It is not very flexible in the content structuring, with its requirement
that all content be organized as section/category/items. In the real world
not all content fits neatly into this model (what happens if you want 4 or
5
levels for instance?), and you are often forced to hack it to make it work
or worse use static content, thus defeating the very purpose of a dynamic
site. There is NO true hierarchical system for content; this seems to be
eternally 'coming' however it does seem that the upcoming version 5 is
slated to have this.
It really is very bloated, just try for instance making sense of the DB
structure and methodology, or the code classes, and one has to wonder why
user polls, click thru banners etc are a 'core module', when in a
commercial
context you will be unlikely to ever use them, it took me ages to strip all
this bloat out.
Mambo fails to cleanly separate code from content, there is for instance
lots of html embedded in its sparsely or negligibly documented and massive
code base. It is a long way from xhtml strict and relies heavily on tables
(YUK) so there is accessibility issues if that's a thing u require.
It also takes a bit of work to be SEO, though this is certainly
achievable,
and I find its menu linked breadcrumb system irritating.
If you don't mind getting your hands dirty its worth having a look at XML
Sapiens, Zope/Plone or Apache Cocoon. PHP has very good XML/XSLT in version
5 so if you can find a host that provides a Java servlet container like
Tomcat you could ever try the native XML database eXist which supports
XQuery and then sidestep SQL all together.
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