I actualy did give mambo a quick tryout and i really liked it’s cool-looking menu interface and it also seemed pretty easy to use.
I see what you mean about forum integrations. From that point of view it seems like mambo is growing into some kind of all-around portal system.
It’s not that i don’t like it’s features, community or anything since it does have the whole network of friendly community sites. It’s just i’d like a full phpbb or alike forum integration made without trouble and as you said, mambo is not quite there yet.
Everytime i read about mambo (from their site or other’s reviews) they say it’s a CMS with accent to content management and not community building. They even refer to the article about evaluating content management system. From that point of view it seems like they are adding forums as addon feature more than a core feature as it should be in a community portal system.
But anyway, i am ready to try it out more thouroughly, i’ll research about it working with phpbb and who knows, if i don’t find anything better and i don’t stay with xoops, i might just start dancing with my site to mambo.
This is actualy the second site i am building, the first is www.cosmicall.net, the online home site for Cosmicall, my electronic music band (actualy duo). It’s made in NVU and is not powered by any CMS. So this is the first time i am going with CMS and the first time i am building a seriously ‘big’ portal community site. I like doing it and i’ll like it even more once i happily set myself up with the right CMS, start designing the default theme, actualy start writing some content and managing the first site users.
Take a look at MX-System, which I confess I am a developer there.
I was looking for the same thing that you wanted… a CMS that had full phpBB integration. This is a tough thing to acomplish because most of the CMS’s projects require modding phpBB - quite a pain. That was what turned me on to phpBB actually, back in 2002 I had a phpNuke site (my first ever site) and I wanted forums… well that phpBB2Nuke project had a solution, but then nuke had like security hole after security hole, and I decided that I couldn’t wait for the nuke people to get their act together. The thing I discovered is MX-System.
MX-System does not modify any phpBB files, but rather includes the appropriate phpBB files as a pseudo-library. The CMS provides page building features and a set of modules that include album, web links, calendar, etc.
Here are a few of my sites that I have that run MX-system:
gortbusters and onpointtactical have a slightly modified layout engine that uses some CSS style to layout the columns. This will be rolled into the next major version of MX.
I want to thank those of you who recommended Mambo. I just started using it a day ago and absolutely love it. It is really easy to customize and very organised. I am a huge fan of Mambo now.
Do any of these cms allow automatic linking within a multipage article? Say if the article is several pages long then next and previous links are genarated automatically for navigation.
Any ideas?
Mambo supports pagination by using a special tag (called a mosbot) in the content item. You just put {mospagebreak} everywhere you want a page break and the table of contents is automatically generated (if you so desire).
Thank you people for recommendations, but i think i am gonna stick with xoops afterall which showed that it’s fit for the site i am developing more than other CMS’s and the problem i had was resolved. It was obviously an issue of files being corrupted through an FTP transfer that caused the site to malfunction. Actualy, functionaly was nothing wrong, only updates to modules were not working properly, but now when i reuploaded and reinstalled the whole system it works fine.
I should just be more careful about uploading files and replacing folders via FTP in the future and not overload the connection which can generate these coruptions in transfers obviously.
You can see the site at www.libervis.com. It is now in a final stages of development. I created forums and blogs category’s and put the 7dana template that will be edited for visuals to be more unique. Everyone interested in open source is welcome to register and of course to give suggestions.
The reason I joined mx-system development was of all the security holes in phpNuke (this was back in late 2002)… every day I’m glad I did because it integrates the forum which is a lot more important than all the little toy-like nuke modules/blocks. Most people who return to a website just want to use the forum and rarely use anything else
I have a MX module development guide over at their knowledge base if you want to get your hands dirty with some PHP
I’m working on one right now. Anyone who has ever used phpBB or vbulletin will be familiar with it’s adminCP layout. But unfortunately it is still in the early stages of development and we are looking for more core developers.
It won’t have phpBB integration but it will have a forums system similar. Keep it in mind for the future
The way you have the forum now looks fine to me. As long as the templates match the site, and there’s a link back to the main site, for me that looks clean and uncluttered.
I tried mambo and liked it a lot. Then I tried tikiwiki and liked it even more. Tikiwiki http://www.tikiwiki.org is the most feature rich and best supported CMS I have come across. It is availible on sourceforge and is actively developed. The system is based around a very rich wiki so it is easy to create nice looking content even if you don’t know html and everything can be tweaked visualy through the global style sheet which makes it very easy to adjust the look and fell. (it also supports templates).
The only downer is that all the feature richness creates complexity so it a steep learning curve to hack. All the features have control pannels though so you don’t have to hack it unless you really want to.
TikiWiki is very powerful, but if you plan on growing a fair bit, then it would not be the best one to use. It is very resource intensive. I have been doing a lot of work with TikiWiki lately, and find it a great CMS but probably used in a different environment than Mambo (which I like much better).
