Product DescriptionAn advanced level guide to customizing and extending Create custom layouts, modules, Mambots, set up an e-commerce store, and more Make your site multilingual, accessible, and optimized for speed and search engines Master DOCMAN, the document manager for Mambo, to turn your Mambo site into a dynamic repository of shared documents and files Avoid common security traps and pitfalls and learn how attackers think In Detail Mambo is a PHP-based Open Source CMS. Mambo is both easy to use at the entry level for creating basic websites, while having the power and flexibility to support complex web applications. Mambo implements the core requirements of a full featured CMS. It has a powerful and extensible templating system with the ability to upload and manage many different data types. User access control, content approval, rich administrative control, content display scheduling are all built-in. New features and extensions are constantly added to the core system, with many more being available and supported by the community. Most of the Mambo development team now works on a fork of Mambo known as Joomla. Mastering Mambo is fully compatible with Joomla’s 1. 0 release. What you will learn from this book? Approach Using a highly graphical, practical style the experienced authors show you how to get the most out of Mambo’s more advanced features and abilities. Who this book is written for? Mastering Mambo is the book for anybody who has developed a Mambo web site, and wants to expand what their site can do and make the most of this powerful content management system. It is not a tutorial in the Mambo basics. Nor is it a comprehensive reference to Mambo’s workings. Instead, it shows you how to employ Mambo’s most powerful and useful features in your own site or intranet.
Details
Mastering Mambo: E-Commerce, Templates, Module Development, SEO, Security, and Performance
Average Ratings 3.5 out of 5
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This book does not offer you the info to start with Mambo/Joomla without help. It simply lacks the depth for it. I bought the book, and followed the examples, that’s all i can do now. The examples are simple, but for a joomla starter hardley explained. Wat cracks me is that there’s not any explanatio about the structure of Joomla, the relations between objects and their calls.
Rating: 2 / 5
I ordered this item and it was returned as undeliverable – at least twice.
So I really can’t comment other than that – the delivery system is not very good.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book is a very good and complete tutorial on advanced uses of the Mambo CMS and associated components.
Alas, like any paper book about an open source product, it has a hard time keeping up with current developments. Still work the price of admission.
Particularly useful topics include eCommerce (This add-in is now called “VirtueMart”), and Search Engine Optimization.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought Mastering Mamo because I believed it would be for an advanced or more seasoned user seeing that there was already a “Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial Building Websites With Mambo” by the same publisher. The book is geared more towards work (document management, e-commerce) based as opposed to personal sites.
For a book published Dec 2005, I found it to be a little dated although not enough to be an issue. I also found several typos.
In my opinion, this book is very good for a person who has installed mambo/joomla, and is trying to understand how the ideas behind how the CMS works. This book is great for accellerating the learning curve of how Components, Modules, and Bots interplay. . . What positions are and how they work. . . And overall how to start extending the default install.
About half the book is nice overviews of 3rd party extensions. I think that is the best part of the book. It’s nice to have them but I wouldn’t buy the book for it.
The sections on security and Search Engine Optimization, and performance tuning are good for begining web/cms developers, but readers already familiar with the basics (applicable to all web apps) are not going to get a whole lot. There isn’t much that is “Mambo/Joomla” specific.
Overall I’d say that it’s a good book that I would recommend to a mambo/joomla beginner intent on building service style sites.
I give this book 3 stars because it is a good book, but despite what it says, that it is for “anyone who has developed a mambo site”. . . anyone who HAS developed already knows how the core components works, already knows how to search for, find, and install Comp, Mods, Bots. . . at least. So half the book is useless, the other half is 3PD extensions which can be found and on the web.
Again, good for noobs who are trying to figure out what all the admin pages, fields and parameters are for but if you’re already comfortable in the backend. . . move on.
Rating: 3 / 5
“Mastering Mambo” is a new book for people running and building websites with the Mambo Content Management System. , It was written in an awkward time, when the Mambo CMS was in the process of splitting from Joomla, but because the codebases of both projects is still so similar, “Mastering Mambo” is a relevant book for both Mambo and Joomla users.
Initially, I was a little confused about the target audience for this volume. The same publisher (Packt) also has a book called “Building Websites with Mambo” that would be more appropriate than for Mambo beginners. The authors, Tobias Hauser and Christian Wenz, describe this book as being for “administrators, designers and developers” which encompasses a pretty wide group of people with diverse skill-levels.
The first part of the book begins by covering the most basic features such as how to logon, install components, change templates and so on. It would suit someone building a site for the first time with Mambo.
As it progresses, the book becomes more complex. There are chapters on Mambelfish, VirtueMart (called PHP-Shop here) and DocMan as well as chapters that summarise options for people wanting forums and galleries. By the time it gets to page 180 out of 250, the authors are describing how to develop your own modules and mambots. This is done in a clear way, with Mambo’s functions and variables explained quickly and concisely.
That completed, the third part of the book describes ways to complete a successful Mambo deployment. The Search Engine Optimisation chapter is OK, but could do with more information on producing a Google-friendly template rather than just human-readable URLs. The Accessibility chapter could also do with more Mambo-specific advice.
However, there are two excellent chapters in this final section. The chapter on security is very useful. It covers cross site scripting, SQL injection, unexpected user data and more. It offers smart advice and is reasonably detailed. Finally, the performance and caching chapter is short and sweet, particularly in its coverage of the uses that Zend software.
Overall, the book is well-written and has a lot of useful illustrations. Nonetheless, it suffers from two weaknesses. One is the unavoidable problem that software development moves more quickly than publishing process and some of the information here is inevitably out-of-date. The second is that although I liked “Mastering Mambo”, I’m unsure who to recommend it for. Rather it is an all-round effort. Administrators can use the first part of the book. Developers new to Mambo will benefit from the second half.
Rating: 4 / 5
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