Ask Idealware: Does Mambo Make Sense Compared to Joomla?

Laura asks: I know that the Joomla open source content management system split off from the Mambo one a little ways back, and you hear a lot about it, but Mambo itself seems to be alive as well. Is Mambo still a good option in a CMS? Is there any reason to choose it over Joomla?

Michelle Murrain of MetaCentric Technology Advising says:
Mambo is the progenitor of Joomla, and although it did not die when Joomla was born, it lost many of the core development team. Mambo is still under active development, and is currently undergoing a complete rewrite, when it will be based on the CakePHP framework. So at this time, Mambo and Joomla are quite similar, and many add-ons work in both CMS. However, with the recent release of Joomla 1.5, and the future release (date not at all clear) of Mambo 5.0, the code bases of the two projects will be quite different. It is unclear how the feature set of Mambo 5.0 will differ from Joomla.

At this point the feature sets of the two CMS are almost identical, and Joomla has by far the most active development team, and many more users. Unless there is a specific reason to go with Mambo (like a site already in Mambo) there doesn't seem much reason to choose Mambo over Joomla.

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