5 July 2007 — A consortium of PHP developers has announced today that several leading Open Source PHP projects will be dropping support for older versions of PHP in upcoming releases of their software as of February 5, 2008 as part of a joint effort to move the PHP developer community fully onto PHP version 5. The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the effort.

Originally written for Xaneon Development by Arto Bendiken

Now, when making any comparison such as this, the first thing to realize is that it’s unlikely that one tool will fit every need and purpose. To an extent, comparing Mambo and Drupal is comparing apples to oranges. They are two very different systems, with widely differing goals and intended audiences. They just both happen to fit under the convenient heading of “content management systems”, meaning you can create decent websites with either one of them.

Also, the people on our team probably don’t represent the broad cross-section of Mambo users out there; our needs don’t necessarily fit their needs. We are. for the most part, people with strong technical backgrounds. Some of our reasons for abandoning Mambo may not resonate at all with the “average user”, if there is such a person. Unless you are a programmer, or have an equally deep technical understanding, take everything we say with a grain of salt.

General Comparison

Mambo has, for a long time, been ahead of competing CMS projects with regards to marketing. Mambo’s public image is pretty, appealing and very marketable to management. Mambo has no doubt benefited from the sponsoring company and trademark owner Miro’s advertising dollars in this regard.

Of course, this was all before the recent hostile project takeover by Miro; while there are people who will argue that any publicity is good publicity, we’ll just have to sit and see how this particular move will play out.

Drupal, in contrast, has been a community project from the start. There’s been no single strong corporate sponsor (though that’s changing with entities such as CivicSpace throwing their weight behind the project) to hold sway over the project, and the overall image has been somewhat less glitzy and more downplayed.