Interview With Mambo Book Author, Hagen Graf

To celebrate the release of Building Websites with Mambo, we decided to interview the book's author, Hagen Graf, to get his views on the popular Content Management System.

Hagen Graf:
Mambo fits in the gap of userfriendly CMS for you and me. We are the market! In my opinion it brings CMS to the masses (of people).

What do you think makes Mambo so popular?

• Simplicity and effectiveness
• The webinstaller
• The userfriendly admininstration
• The comfortable installation of third party components, modules, themes, languages
• Search engine friendly URLs
• RSS Feeds
• A lot of ready made templates
• A big developer community
• The professional look and feel
  
  

What features of Mambo excite you?

The Installer system. You download a component packet from mamboserver.com. You point to the link *install* in your mambo ... thats it. It is like apt-get in Debian Linux.

The content creation with metatags, picture and a lot of other stuff and the very logical and userfriendly administration area.

What changes or features would you like to see added to Mambo in the future?

• A bridge to OpenOffice.org as a TextEditor for a Mambo site.
• Portable content. The possibility to migrate a site from CMS xy (Drupal, ezPublish, Typo3) to mambo and vice versa
• More integration of the blogosph�re (tagging, foaf, moblogging content into mambo via a mobile device)
• A workflow component
• A more configurable user roles and rights system
  
  

Mambo comes out of the box, however what do you think of the quality of the modules and other contributions from the community?

They are as good as the contributors. I think it would be a good idea to do something in a sense a quality management for components. May be a kind of Mambo certificate. It may be possible to do a selforganizing evaluation process together with the community and the Mambo foundation as in the role of a steering commitee.

How does your book help people who are new to Mambo?

Readers will learn a lot about Content Management Systems and more specifically about Mambo. Ultimately, they will be able to run their own Mambo website, design their own Mambo template and for people proficient in php, they will be able to create their own mambo components, modules and mambots.

How does your book help existing users of Mambo?

It is a guide through the Mambo system. A lot of users will never use all the different possibilities with Mambo, they are happy to manage it in a pragmatic way. In the book, I describe a few third party components like simpleboard forum, events, comments and a photo gallery and I describe how to create new components, modules and mambots.

Thanks for your time Hagen.