Wondering if anybody had thoughts on this. Mambo 5.0 if it ever comes out sounds cool. And I've seen lots of people posting like xaraya is so amazing but nobody ever said what was so great, just acted as if everybody knows xaraya is amazing.

For my site I need lots of specific permissions. Users need to have one page they can edit, and also user blogs, but these need to be in sections based on the continent the user is in. I thought tiki wiki would be easiest for this but am not so sure. Maybe xaray is most flexible? I don't know. Post your thoughts. thanks.

P.S. One thing about tiki is the support fourms suck. Users aren't quick to help anybody else out.
P.S.P.S. are there any good mod sites for xaraya?

Did you read this thread?

http://www.xoops.org/modules/newbb/vi ... mp;forum=8#forumpost89355

Maybe it gives you some more on xaraya. Mambo i never looked into it despite hearing the name from time to time.

But if you are still in the process of determining which cms should be the one you use i would do the following:

1. have a first look into it. Many ones can be tested right here

2. make a list of the things you need on your website. Which kind of modules for which purpose do you need.

3. check the homepages of the cms in question. Check for their community (forum / news). See how they reacted to newbie questions, how many unanswered question are there, how is their tone ....

4. Post a concrete question with your needs into their forum asking them whether their cms does fullfill you needs and for suggestions which add-ons would do the trick. Be as concrete as possible - the better the answers you get.

5. for opinions of people which most likely tested several cms better check on pages like cmsmatrix. You might find some users here too, but the chances to get a response there is just higher. Also answers won´t be as biased sometimes because checking on whatever cms website gives logically the high probability of people anwering because they just like this cms.


Now for my little story:

I got stuck here after i started out with postnuke. Xoops was the second cms i tried. I dropped postnuke because there was not too much going on at that time towards a release of a new version and from the postings in the forum at that time i got a feeling they have no real plan (which is not true but it changed to often in a short timeframe) as to how to proceed. I didn´t like the documentation too much and didn´t really get my questions answered.

When i started usings xoops everything went good. Heaven was blue and the sun shining all day. It had everything i ever wanted, was easy to install and every question got answered.


... ahhh wait thats not exactly true ... Xoops just works for me at the moment. I like the ease of installation and i appreciate the support. There are plenty modules and if you ask a question - usually you will find someone giving an answer. If you check the forums you will not find too much unanswered questions.
Xoops however lacks documentation for beginners (which is changing and already changed with JackJ´s Xoops for dummies guide for example. I would have love to have that when i started with Xoops.

I was/am also amazed by such beautiful words about xaraya and tried to taste it.
Yes, I installed and preliminarily configured.
but later it reported errors and I did not touch it again.
Perhaps will check it when I have time.

I have compared Xaraya, Drupal, Mambo and XOOPS in a Comparison

concluding that Mambo is easy to use, Xaraya has a lot of features, Drupal is just plain weird and XOOPS is good at being understandable, yet flexible and ok on the feature side. Xaraya is difficult to setup properly, but have loads of features.

xaraya seemed buggy to me. biggest reason is they don't disable modules/addins that conflict (they should keep conflicting files from being enabled..)



very time consuming to customize, but true, ton of features.

i was mainly confused by it tho



mambo looks cool



xoops rules, tried postnuke, used phpnuke, tried exoops, used nsnnuke, tried opensitemanager. nothing holds a candle to xoops imho

Yeah.... tried PHPNuke, PHP Website, PHPX, Mambo.... Xoops is by far the easiest to install and configure.

Another site that is quite interesting when comparing is OpensourceCMS. They've got a lot of CMS's installed and they let you play with them, both as user and as admin.


I've used quite a lot of CMS's along the way. Not one of them is perfect (yet), but many are quite good for certain needs.
Xaraya really looks very promising. The problem is that it is a bit hard. Hard to install and to grasp completely. On the other hand is very powerfull.
Mambo is, I'd say, near the opposite from Xaraya. It's very easy to install and get going. IMHO, it lacks flexibility.
XOOPS is very nice. I could say more, but I guess you all know about XOOPS ;)


But as someone said before, it all depends on your needs. My advice is simply: try them. Try them at the site I gave (or at demo sites which some of them have on their official sites). Try a lot of them. Choose 3, 4, 5... the ones that seems like may fit your needs. Then download those and install them locally for a couple of days, to really get a good feel of their capabilities. Then decide which best fits your needs and taste.

a cool 'cms' which doesn't really fit the mold that *nuke has set, is phpwCMS

it has some cool admin features, alot of image manipulation, full control over the design from admin. neat stuff.

Hi, I am more of programmer than designer. and thats my experience of my two sites of XOOPS for communities of about 300 peoples (10% really active - submitters):
XOOPS is my first CMS to live with.
* Fluent instalation
* quite intuitive admin panel (backend) - thoug sometimes was time consuming to deal with access rights..
* smarty wasn't of big (or maybe even any) use for me..
* was time-consuming to find and make up the design we wanted
* I managed to hack some modules, but didn't manage to make up my own (even a blank one..).
** because there were not enough docs
** for me xoops OO seemed compicated to code according to it
* was hard time (well, more of "took a while") making up horizontal dynamic menus
* my xoops theme loads slower than mambo sites I know (well may be I overloaded it with js.. - for dynamic menu and and ability for modules to collapse http://somsa.ktusa.lt/xoops)


MAMBO is what I used now for several projects.
* installation no worse than XOOPS (even has sample data - to see the basic design of site at once)
* theming/designing is more simple (HTML with some php)- so time-saving (we all like it, don't we :) - bigger variety than XOOPS
* can have unlimited areas for blocks (xoops has just 5: R, CC, CR, CL, L).
* Has good content management in the core (xoops has probably 5 content management modules, and its confusing..)
* a bunch of adopted dynamic menus and WYSIWYG editors
* navbar/pathway in the core
* more flexible, because
** mambo is more modular (imho) - it lets develop and manage blocks separately from modules (in mambo terms blocks are called "modules" and modules are called "components" - strange ;).
** mambots - things for linking between modules(components in mamb) - didn't try, but they have potential
* user management - groups can inherit rights according to hierarchy - so easier to setup installed features (especially, when there are many features)
* seems to have bigger community
=> generally - more admin-friendly and user-atractive, and users are the reason, why we need Portal systems, isn't it?
* and multilanguage (still a hack, but promises to be in the core of v4.6 (now is v4.5.1)) (also multiple categories for articles promised in 4.6)
several minuses:
- at first it seems weird, that components and modules are stored separately
- doesn't have comments feature in core, but there is mambot whitch can help ;) (generaly it is orentiered more towards content than community).
- well, they have tey own cache system, don't know about it more
- updates are more often than xoops, but the reason in my mind is that mambo is evolving more dynamically
- v4.5.1 still doesn't have fully integrated gallery. but media manager or paralelly installed RC Gallery with random photo block can help

may be I wrote not very clearly, so I'll check out if some questions will arise

short overview of 10 CMS's: mxx included :)
http://biz-whiz.com/print225.html