I relaunched my website as well as a new site for my forthcoming book the other day, having moved both to an open-source content management system called Mambo. A year ago, I wrote about my own (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to install Mambo on a local server. This time I did it the smart way, using the Metropolis service provided by GoDaddy to its hosting account customers. Metropolis offers several free software packages for your server and is a nice resource that I’ll bet few GoDaddy customers even know about.

Mambo installed in just a few minutes and a few clicks. I then spent the next two weeks trying to figure it out. There are a few tutorials on the Web but none that I found prepared me to understand the logical structure used by Mambo. That was trial and error and it took a long time.

I’m a big fan of content management systems. My website was previously built on Microsoft FrontPage. While that gave me plenty of flexibility to play with look and feel, the pages were basically locked in stone once they were created. You couldn’t easily share content between sections of a site, move things around, expose and hide sections or move your site to a new template. Also, your page designs were stored on a local machine, meaning you couldn’t easily access them from another computer.

With a CMS, everything is in a database on the server and the content is stored separately from the page templates. Changing the site design is a snap, and content items can be displayed in a variety of ways on different sections of the site. For example, it’s simple to have an article display on the home page and also an inside page. In FrontPage, you’d need to have two copies of the article to do that, which creates all kinds of problems.

Mambo’s hierarchy uses a concept of sections, categories and content items. This structure made little sense to me when I first encountered it and I’m not sure it even makes sense now. Every content item must belong to a category and a section. You can display all items in a category or a section, which is very powerful. But I’m not sure why you need both containers.

There are basically two types of display: blog and table. A blog shows items in reverse-chron order (you can change that) with a snippet of introductory text and a “read more” link. A table displays an index of content items in rows. It’s nice being able to switch back and forth and try different styles. Mambo gives you lots of options for hiding or displaying titles, icons, navigation devices, ratings systems and other goodies. The problem is just keeping track of it all. Unless you set your global defaults carefully, your pages can all end up looking slightly different from each other.

The content editor that came with my package is MostlyCE Admin, a very nice WYSIWYG editor. The performance frustrated me until I realized you could turn off a bunch of resource-hogging features and improve speed dramatically.

There are a couple of hundred free Mambo templates. Once you set up your site, it’s fun to download a few and applying them to your site. The process is fast and easy and it’s one of the best ways to see the value of a CMS approach.

My sites are still works-in-progress and I’m sure there’s plenty about Mambo I have yet to discover. If I had it to do over again, I’d take the time to buy a book. I also wish I knew more about the PhP scripting language and how cascading style sheets work. I’ve been frustrated, for example, by the size of the headline type on my site but have been unable to figure out how to change it. There’s also a nav bar at the top that appears to be hard-coded into the design but which I can’t seem to modify or delete. I’ll figure this out eventually, but for now it’s just frustrating.

Now I have to figure out what to tinker with during the NEXT holiday season!