Drupal VS. Mambo 1
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.
Let’s start off with some background: we’ve used Mambo for a long time, and we’ve written a multitude of components, modules and mambots for various versions of Mambo, as well as contributed patches and improvements to existing Mambo add-ons. Most of our own projects were coded for internal purposes or limited distribution only, but some, like our popular XE2 component, which provided Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs for Mambo, were released to the Mambo community under open-source terms.
It was only recently, in the last few months, that we “became aware” of Drupal and overcame the initial threshold of trying it out. Funnily enough, this was mostly to steal some good ideas from their SEF implementation; instead, Drupal ended stealing us away from Mambo. So it goes sometimes. Read on for what caused us to abandon all the time and effort we had invested into the Mambo platform…