What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 introduces us to Mambo, and what it can do for us. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Zak Springs Golf Club example site, including a list of the requirements for the site.

Chapter 2 takes you through installing Mambo on a local machine for development purposes.

In Chapter 3, we take our first look at the main elements of a Mambo site, meeting menus, modules, components, templates, and having a quick look at the arrangement of content on a Mambo site. We also take our first steps in the administration area, and are introduced to the important concepts of publishing and access restrictions, and the HTML editor that will be used to enter most of the content on our site. We conclude the chapter with some basic changes to the front page of the site.

We start our Zak Springs example site in Chapter 4 by creating a fresh, empty installation of Mambo. Then we look at the fundamental configuration options available to our site, such as setting up the system to send mail. We also take a look at the Private Messages component in this chapter, which provides us with a quick test of our mail server setup.

Chapter 5 continues the theme of site configuration, by looking at module and component management. These are the main functional elements of your site, and in the chapter we look first at module management, choosing how and where, and on which pages to display them. We walk through the creation of simple RSS and HTML modules from the administration area. To get modules and components into your Mambo system there is a "Universal Installer", that allows you to effortlessly install any kind of Mambo add-on. In the chapter we download and install a third-party calendar add-on. We also have a look at managing media, whereby you can upload resources such as images or documents directly onto the Mambo server, to be used in your content.

Chapter 6 is about menus and templates. Without menus, visitors would have great difficulty in finding anything on your site. A menu is made up of menu items. Menu items point to pages on your site, and also define how the target page should be displayed. In the chapter we walk through creating menu items. We also consider the different types of menu items that are available, and the consequences of these choices for the target page. Templates control the look and feel of your site. A new look for your site can be selected by assigning a new template. We look at the basics of managing templates in this chapter, including how to apply different templates to different pages on the site, so that your site does not look "uniform".

Your site is created for people to visit, and in Chapter 7, we walk through the basics of managing user accounts. Visitors are able to create an account on your site, and in this chapter, we look at what this process involves, and also at some other ways in which user accounts can be created. Users can be put into groups, to which permissions can be assigned. Different types of administrators can be created, as well as different types of front-end users. We look at all this, and create some of these different user types for our Zak Springs site.

In Chapter 8, we finally come to content management in Mambo. The Content component is the main content engine of Mambo, and in this chapter, we look at the organization of content into sections and categories. After creating some of these, we proceed to enter content and examine the options available for entering and controlling the display of our content. We also see how to create menu items that point to our pieces of content, and examine the different views of content provided by the menus, which can display the content as a single item, or list items with a different layout and format.

You can create special users that can add, edit, or publish content from the front end of the site, and in Chapter 9, we look at this. We also look at the publishing workflow this involves, whereby notifications are sent to various administrators to advise them of content submission that requires their approval. The notification system is not entirely straightforward, and we take a careful look at the process, and suggest some solutions to produce a more usable system.

In Chapter 10, we explore some more of the standard components that come with Mambo, and install and walk through the use of some third-party components for adding discussion forums, event scheduling, and a gallery of images.

In Chapter 11, we look at the details of customizing a template to produce a new-looking site. We start with one of the standard Mambo templates, and make changes to the stylesheet and background images to gradually produce a different-looking set of pages.

In Chapter 12, we look at the steps required to deploy our local Mambo site to a remote web server. We also tackle setting file-system permissions for various operations of Mambo to function properly on the remote server. We conclude with a look at restricting access to your administration area using HTTP Authentication.

Appendix A has a walkthrough of installing the XAMPP package, which provides a working installation of PHP, MySQL, and Apache, ready configured for you to test your Mambo site on.