Learning Mambo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website: A well-structured and example-rich tutorial to creating websites using Mambo

The standard installation of Mambo provides many features for its visitors. Some of them are:

That's just some of the features of the standard installation. With a couple of clicks, you can install new features on the site, such as:

Mambo can be customized and extended easily, and there is a huge range of third-party customizations and extensions to be found on the Internet. Any of these can add to the range of features your site provides.

As a potential 'manager' of a Mambo site, as you read through the list of features above, you may think they sound rather attractive, but might also wonder how you will handle all of that.

Mambo provides a web-based management interface. You, as the manager of the site, visit the site and log in with a special super user, or site administrator, account. After this, from the comfort of your web browser, you run the show. You can:

In fact, you don't need to do all of this yourself. You can set up accounts for other people to take over the running of various parts of the site, maybe adding or checking content, or maybe just making sure everything runs smoothly.

The power and flexibility Mambo offers you to manage a complex website would be difficult to achieve without many, many hours of careful programming.

Mambo is built around a 'core' set of functions, which perform mundane tasks such as selecting what part of the application the user should be shown, checking who the user is, and what they can do on the site. What makes Mambo exciting to the world is its support for components. These are extensions to the Mambo core, and provide the real functionality of your site. Mambo's support for managing content comes from the Content component, and there are components for displaying news feeds, discussion forums, and galleries among others. These extensions can be easily configured, and new extensions can be added to the system.

There is no shortage of third-party components on the Internet, and you can find a Mambo component for almost any imaginable purpose.

The look of a Mambo site is controlled by a template. This is a collection of images, styles, and other resources, together with instructions that determine the layout of the page. A new template can be selected, and your site will be transformed immediately. In fact, you can even apply different templates to different parts of your site, so that your site can have different looks across different pages should you wish.

Mambo allows users to create their own account on the site, and takes care of boring details like making sure users can get a new password when they forget their current one. Pages on the site can be restricted so that only certain types of user get to see them, and also, certain users can be given certain permissions so that they can add or edit content themselves. Instead of you having to do everything yourself, you can set up other people to help with the running of the site.

Mambo is free, and it is also open source. After downloading Mambo, all the source code of the application is there in front of you. This means, if you are so inclined, you can dig around to see how it works, or check why something is not working as it should. Mambo is not a perfect application (what is?), and there will always be parts that do not work as they should. Since there are many people using Mambo on the Internet, the problem is usually spotted and the solution is posted on one of the Mambo forums.

Another advantage of having the source of the application (the code) available to you is that you can modify (hack!) it, or extend it in whichever way you choose.

Mambo is released under a license, the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL bestows much freedom in the way that you can work with Mambo, but it also brings along some restrictions. The ins and outs of the GPL are pretty complex, and we aren't even going to attempt an in-depth discussion of the consequences of this. For more information about the GPL visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL.

The GPL should always be respected. The GPL is one of the cornerstones of the free software movement, which was set up to promote rights to use, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The upshot of the license is that Mambo will not be going away. Even if some future version of it were to become completely commercial, the existing code could be taken and modified to create a new version, also released with a GPL license.

We have spoken a lot about adding and editing 'information' on a website. A broader term for information here would be 'content'. To summarize our earlier discussions of Mambo, it allows you to manage the content of your site. In other words, it's a content management system.

According to Wikipedia, a Content Management System (CMS) is a 'system used to organize and facilitate collaborative creation of documents and other content' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system).

Well, it is difficult to define content management system and avoid the words 'a system for managing content'!

You can think of a content management system as playing three roles:

Capturing the content is usually done by users entering data in forms in a web browser. This content is then stored in a database for later retrieval. Serving the content allows the right data to be selected, sorted, and ordered, and then displayed to the visitor in a coherent and consistent way.

Mambo achieves all of these. Users with special accounts can input content from either the administrative part of the site, or even the front end of the site. This content can be maintained and organized from the web-based administration interface by the site administrator. When a visitor requests a page from the site, Mambo will determine which content should be displayed and how it should be ordered. It then handles the output of the content, along with the rest of the page.

Zak Springs Golf Club is located near the Skull Mountains, and boasts two 18-hole golf courses, practice facilities, and extensive hospitality facilities. The Golf Club was recently bought by a mysterious businessman, Otto Simplex, who now runs the club as General Manager. The club had fallen into disrepair over the last 10 years, beset by a number of mysterious incidents and unfortunate accidents. The club was founded 12 years ago, built on land cheaply bought from the military, following the immediate and uncommented closure of the top-secret Nemesis Project. The history of the club is still evident today, since the tougher of the two courses is in fact called Nemesis. The other course is the Sinistra course. Both are now in excellent condition, and present a formidable challenge for even the lowest-handicap golfer.

The Club is looking to expand its membership, and welcome new members from a number of the large metropolises that skirt the Skull mountains.

The Club currently has no website, but Mr. Simplex views the site as key to recruiting new members to the club, and also providing a community for the members of the Club, many of whom live far from the club. In addition to securing new members, retaining the existing members is key to the growth of the Club, and Mr. Simplex feels that keeping the members remotely involved in the club, in addition to providing excellent service and facilities at the Club itself, will go some way to ensuring this.

The Club also has no dedicated IT support person, but the Assistant to the Club Secretary is regarded as the "go-to" person when there is a technical problem.

From detailed meetings with the clients, the following list of objectives and functionality of the site was arrived at. Note that none of these relate specifically to Mambo. Fitting these requirements into Mambo will be the challenge of the later chapters. It is entirely possible that not all of the requirements will be achievable within our first attempt at putting the site together.

Curiously, that last requirement was added in handwriting by the president himself, and did not appear in any earlier document.

The Club President has an ambitious vision for the site. However, in the first version of the site, there are some things that we have postponed. Some of these include:

This is a pretty extensive list of requirements to be going on with, so let's not hang around, since rumor has it that Otto Simplex is not a patient man.