Drupal VS. Mambo 5
Search Engine Friendly URLs
This is a subject that has become intimately familiar to us. One of our earliest requirements for a CMS was adequate support for free-form, human-readable URLs. At the time we started to use Mambo, there really wasn’t any solution to this aside from some hacks shared in the Mambo forum, and a commercial SEF add-on for Mambo developed by one of the core developers.
To solve the problem, we wrote Xaneon Alias Manager 1.0, which allowed us to define friendly URLs manually for all of Mambo’s content pages. While it worked quite well, and hundreds of websites are still using XAM today, it was a labor-intensive solution for larger sites. Eventually, out of dissatisfaction with having to maintain the friendly URLs manually grew Xaneon Extensions 2.0 (XE2) for Mambo, which introduced automated friendly URLs for both content items and component-generated paths.
Unfortunately, while achieving a good measure of automation, the component’s complexity skyrocketed. Mambo itself is simply not designed for friendly URLs, and what’s worse, most of the third-party components for Mambo don’t take any measures to even try to support friendly URLs. As a result, writing a “perfect” SEF solution for Mambo is an incredibly labor-intensive task. We welcome anyone to try it as a Sunday-afternoon exercise…
Over the last year, many people have privately expressed their concerns to us about the fact that a Mambo core developer is charging for a SEF component that should, in their view, be integrated in Mambo’s core. From our own “inside perspective”, we can, on one hand, understand this developer charging for his component, since we know the work involved in developing a comprehensive Mambo SEF solution. (Come to think of it, charging for ours might have motivated us to actually finish it.) On the other hand, we must agree that Mambo should come with significantly better SEF support out-of-the-box, and that the current situation is curious, to say the least. We do believe the (former) core team to be in serious error on this matter.
Fortunately, the situation with Drupal is much better. SEF support, on a level comparable to our Alias Manager component, is fully integrated into the Drupal core, and there is an open-source add-on available which adds automated friendly URLs in a manner comparable to XE2. There are a few small convenience features we are considering implementing and contributing, but already Drupal’s SEF support is more integrated and usable than we could ever achieve in Mambo without patches to the core. It simply works as intended, and the code and solution is elegant.