What Mambo Can Do for You
Put simply, Mambo helps you create websites easily. It provides a back end, a control area if you like, from where you add content and information to the site, configure the way things look, and also create a front-end public view of your site.
Maybe you want to create a site about wine making, flowers, programming, zombie films, or even dinosaurs. Maybe you want to create a site to promote your business and your products. Whatever type of site you want to create, Mambo helps you to structure the site to hold information relevant to your visitors; be it news stories about a forthcoming zombie film, links to other zombie sites, or even a gallery of stills from zombie films.
The best bit is, you don't have to be an expert programmer to achieve all this. With only rudimentary knowledge of HTML, you can engineer a unique-looking Mambo website, packed with the information you want for your site and your visitors.
The Visitor Experience
The standard installation of Mambo provides many features for its visitors. Some of them are:
- Searchable content items (articles) organized into groups
- Ability of visitors to create an account on the site, and log in to their own personal area
- Ability of visitors to add comments about articles
- Straw polls
- A catalog of web links
- RSS syndication of your articles to share your content with other sites
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:
- Discussion forums
- Galleries of images
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.
The Management Experience
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:
- Add new information, edit, delete, or move existing pieces of information
- Control how the site will look
- Decide the features of the site
- Add media (documents, images, sounds) directly to the site
- Control what is displayed on the pages
- Control who is able to see what
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.