Aug

Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial

Building, fast, introductory, Mambo, paced, Tutorial, Websites

Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial

A fast paced introductory tutorial to this well established PHP/MySQL based content management system Get your Mambo website up fast Walk through the whole process Customise and extend your Mambo site

In Detail Mambo is a mature and fully featured Content Management System (CMS). First released in 2001, the system is now on release 4.5.x and is supported by an active and well organized open source development team and community. Mambo is both easy to use at the entry level for crea

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List Price: $ 39.99

Price: $ 9.99

5 Comments to “Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial”

Michael Blyth August 9, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Review by Michael Blyth for Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial
Rating:
Notes from a total newbie to Mambo: Maybe this is the best Mambo book available. I don’t know as I haven’t seen the others. However I was pretty disappointed with it. For starters, it’s only 231 pages long, which isn’t much for $40, but maybe that’s inevitable for a book with a smaller audience. I was expecting a book with lots of detailed information but most of the book is either a rehash of the manual or a restatement of what is obvious from the menus themselves:

“Banner Name: Name of the banner

Published: Whether the banner is published or not

Impressions Made: Number of impressions to date

Impressions Left: Number of remaining impressions

Clicks: Clicks on the banner

% Clicks: Proportion of impressions to clicks.”

Compare this with the (free) manual’s description of the same:

“Impressions Made – This displays the number of times the banner has been shown on your site.

Impressions Left – This displays the number of impressions left to display if a limit has been set while creating or editing a banner.

Clicks – This displays the number of times that particular banner has been clicked on by a user of the site.

% Clicks – This displays the number of clicks as a percentage ratio to the number of impressions that have been made. 1% would mean for example, that 1 in every 100 people had clicked on the banner.

Published – This displays whether the banner is currently Published for display or not.”

Want to know what the “Module Positions” menu does? I wanted to know and couldn’t figure it out from the help box at first. Well, “module position” is not in the index. In fact, the only index entries for “module” are “module” and “module copying.” The scrawny index has no entry for “menu” or “help”, either. So it gets hard to find things. If there is a good explanation of the “Module Positions,” I’m yet to find it.(BTW, I finally figured it out … it’s nothing but a table of position names and has nothing to do with the actual positioning. I think!)

The last three chapters of the book do go beyond the basics, though still with the unevenness and lack of detail. You can learn how to install a component, design a template, and write your own program extensions. The last is only 20 pages long, though.

Summary: The obscure remains obscure and the obvious is made doubly so. If, like me, you like to have a hard copy manual on hand, and you don’t mind the price, you may be happy (after all, the previous 4 reviewers were very happy). If you’re looking for something more, keep looking or at least browse the inside of the book before buying.
Julian Rickards August 9, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Review by Julian Rickards for Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial
Rating:
I have not used a CMS before, other than WordPress (that I consider to be a light-weight and focused CMS) so I decided to give Mambo a whirl but not without the help of this book. Unlike some other reviewers, the subtitle of my copy reads “A step by step tutorial” and so I read the book with that in mind.

There are a couple of minor problems with the book. It was originally written in German and translated to English. The translation is not perfect and a couple of sentences required rereading but this is a minor matter. The other problem is that one of the most useful tutorials is on how to install the German language module which, for a book that has been translated into English, doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep. It would have been my wish to use this valuable space to provide other tutorials.

My review was focused on whether the book could help me download, install, set up, and use Mambo to build a Web site but unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to my wishes. Some of the tutorials are good but for the most part, the largest chapter of the book reads more like a users guide than a tutorial and the last three chapters are for more advanced users.

Although the book does work as a decent users guide and it does appear to be better than Mambo’s web site, this book could have had better tutorials.
prime August 9, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Review by prime for Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial
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I bought this book to research how to implement a new site on Mambo CMS. It basically was a copy of basic explanations that are on the mambo site, and only addressed the structure that is in place with default values on the test page. Why bother spending the money when all of the info is online? And why call it a tutorial, when it doesn’t show you how to do anything, but rather just explains what each thing is supposed to do?

Also, and this is my fault for not thinking about it when I was buying, but 227 pages of computer book is not worth $40. Even if it were really good, which it’s not.
Terry Mcelligott August 9, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Review by Terry Mcelligott for Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial
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Hagen Graf’s “Building Websites with Mambo” couldn’t have arrived at a better time. “Building Websites with Mambo” gives you the complete tour much more clearly than does Mambo’s built-in help which, to put it politely, appears to have been written by purely technical minds for other purely technical minds. If a content management system (CMS) makes sense for your site, and if you don’t have time or resources to gather a really strong technical team, you’ll find this book a helpful addition to the existing Mambo knowledge base.

Graf’s book defines what a CMS is and isn’t, then moves on to the concepts central to this particular program. Designers, communicators and writers possessing a little technical savvy will appreciate the chapter on installing an experimental, fully working Mambo test site on a home or office computer. The book includes complete text versions of web links for reference sites, and the book’s publisher has made available Mambo resource files on the support pages of its own site.

For the Mambo neophyte, one of the most confusing things can be seeing the default home page for the first time — especially if the newcomer has strong ideas on how the page should look and work. Graf realizes this and continues with a tour and rationale of why Mambo does what it does the way it does. He follows that with ideas on customization, ways to extend Mambo’s capabilities with forums, photo galleries and the like, and finally deals with setting site styles such as colours and text.

Today’s reality is such that websites need the right blend of content and ease of use for visitors. The web used to be a fad. Now it’s the way things are. The user is in charge and Mambo can take a starring role. The semi-technical person handed the job of webmaster who finds the task of wading through Mambo’s interface and documentation an odious if necessary undertaking will find Graf’s book a godsend.

Terry Mc Elligott

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Olivier August 9, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Review by Olivier for Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial
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Bad points :

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- No real structure

- Hardly any advice on why to use this or that function

- Most options not even explored (has the author ??)

- What is the use of including code with no explanation on how to use it and/or what it is for ?

- Expensive

Good points

———–

- Gives some kind of an overview, but the time reading the book, one could have figgered that out by himself

- Explains some of the shortcomings of Mambo/Joomla

Conclusion :

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This has been the worst book I have ever read, and I do not understand anyone that gives it a score higher than 3 stars.. Expect the ‘great’ reviews to be written by the author or friends of the author, I serious disagree with their view !

A book should encourage the reader not demotivate..

Next time the author writes the book, he better stays at one place and get focussed (and not travelling from place to place and connect to free wireless lans… as he introduces the book)

Spent your money on books that are worth it, definitely not this one !!!