Here is the history of Foliovision with Mambo and Joomla. Our first major project in a CMS (as opposed to SSI – server side includes) was a Mambo project. Dr. Ian Firla and I built a monumental mortgage site with what seemed like our bare hands.
Making Mambo work as well for SEO as flat html files was a monumental task, but one at which we were ultimately successful. After careful consideration of how slow and unwieldy Mambo became in production, we made the decision to move to WordPress (at that point at 1.2 with 1.5 coming soon).
As you can see, we haven’t looked back.
But developers are strange creatures. Our CIO who encouraged me to move to WordPress back then- after inheriting the mortgage site – later decided that he would like to learn some new programming languages. He even suggested we switch over to Ruby on Rails.
That’s something I said no to. We are so conversant now in WordPress, why would we want to use something else?
There is nothing we can’t do in WordPress and PHP is a flexible and quick language. Of course we have to keep our own set of built modules ready but at the end of the day it makes more sense to stay with what we know and what we can easily adapt.
Stay expert!
Thank you Mambo and Joomla. And goodbye. We won’t forget you.
But life is easier apart.
I just started using Joomla and am having trouble finding good template galleries. Any suggestions?
Hi Greyholme,
Honestly I’d suggest moving to WordPress. The platform is much more flexible and the pace of development is amazing. The tools available in WordPress are mind-boggling. Mambo/Joomla is such a hassle just for even basic SEO.
Hi Alec,
it is never-ending story WordPress or Joomla? I just finished developemnt of one Joomla! 1.5.15 (latest) site and I was amazed how good it is, but also found out that is not easy for end user (without webdesign basic knowledge/training). No doubt that WordPress is good (google – 263,000,000 results -> Joomla 85,900,000). However,Joomla is younger as I know. WordPress seems to be faster, but I think it depends on setup and site. Your sites are perfect example of clean, seo friendly, usable websites. On the other hand this website looks too much black and white, minimalistic, without visual (so it must be fast). People likes visual content, as it is easier to navigate and find info.
For Joomla is ton of free templates, modules and some for free which you can customize (if you have enough experience). Joomla is also seo friendly and now it uses SEF out of the box (SEF opt-in).
It is hard decision which CMS (as hard as which hosting company :). For me was helpful http://www.cmsmatrix.org and fact that I found more training materials on Joomla, than on wordpress.
Sorry for long post – > but this is currently hot and interesting topic for me.
Best regards,
Pavol
Slovakia
Hi Pavol,
Thanks for stopping by.
Joomla is just a fork of Mambo and much older than WordPress actually. “Mambo CMS” delivers another 2,850,000 search results.
I would never go back to using Joomla or Mambo. WordPress is so much lighter and more flexible. The only way I would recommend it is if you need a very particular industry-specific module which is already built in to or available for Joomla. I.e. the kind of thing which would cost $15 or $20K to develop independently.