I first ran across Mambo CMS a long while back when I was struggling to choose a CMS for IA Dynamo. Late in 2005, most of the core 3rd-party developers forked Mambo and created Joomla!.

I ended up choosing textpattern.

When I joined Imprints Group, a revamp of the site was very necessary. It had not been updated since early 2002.

I felt that textpattern was the way to go, as it offered basic functionality for the team to post content, as well as providing the underlying publishing engine for this site.

My biggest concern right now is that Textpattern does not support sub-sections. This is unfortunate, however, given it’s origins as a “Blogging engine + much more”, not entirely surprising.

This technical problem made my life really difficult—as well as lackluster visual design.

Last night, I was prompted by an email from Elaine to look at joomla. I briefly replied that I was aware of it in passing, only having dabbled a bit using Mambo. Having never installed it, I decided to put it through its paces and added it in a demo directory to imprints. The installation was dead simple: Dreamhost has a 1-click install.

In about 1.5 hours, I had most of the navigation working.

This thing is very easy to use.

There are also standalone Joomla! Development Server for download as well as a Dreamweaver MX 2004 extension for creating Joomla! compatible templates.

Very impressive. I’ve decided to drop the textpattern stuff and use it for imprints.

I doubt I’d use it for IA dynamo, but who knows?

Tai