As you might guess from the title, I'm a Mac user. Mostly, this doesn't matter too much when it comes to building websites with Mambo. But I've had occasional surprises.

Mac OS X and Mambo 

TextEdit in Rich Text Mode is Useless for Editing php Code

My first was as I tried installing Mambo. Had to edit the config.php file - and I tried this with TextEdit, which seemed to be a basic text editor. Mambo just wouldn't work. I eventually found that, in default mode, TextEdit saves files with extra characters that you don't see when editing, but are present in php files, scrambling things (to give one of those dread "parse error" messages I think). One option is, I think, to disable "rich text" in preferences.

But I've since switched to editing php files in Dreamweaver, in the code window. It's surely well over the top for php editing, but I already had Dreamweaver. Can be helpful that it can use coloured text for code, showing different types of code in different colours. I don't know php (just doing cutting and pasting, with code others helpfully provide), but can watch the colours, getting an idea something could be wrong if the colours go awry.

Not all WYSIWYG Editors Work With Mac OS X

Also early on with Mambo, I found I couldn't use WYSIWYG editor that came with Mambo; found this was platform dependent, and the editor worked with Windows machines.

After some digging around, I learned of htmlarea3 editor, which did work on Mac, though I also had to download Firefox browser, which was also new for me at the time. Though there's now more choice for Mac users, I've stuck with htmlarea3 based editor - now, in 4.5.2, using version called TMEdit.

.htaccess is Invisible on Mac Desktop (default view)

When I tried files to generate more search engine friendly URLs (including words), I had no joy. Couldn't figure what the problem was: I'd uploaded all files, as instructed. But, again after spending some time, I found that I'd missed a file - the .htaccess. Not just an oversight; but on Mac, all files with names beginning with a period are invisible.

To see the file, I had to run some third party software. Then, Cocktail; but now, Onyx will do the trick (latest version only works with OS 10.4; but there are other free utilities, which help show invisible files, run cron jobs and other stuff that those of us who rarely or never mess with Terminal find useful).

If you have comments, questions, tips, please email me, or post in the Mambo forum here.

This article predates another Mambo complication: the fork into Mambo (backed by Miro; maybe somewhat corporate) and the - apparently more open source - version that's now called Joomla! 

The Mambo homepage has a nifty slogan: "Power in Simplicity". But is this valid? After more than a year using Mambo, I think there's truth in Power in Simplicity; yet at the same time, there is also Weakness in Complexity.

Some of the power stems from being able to make sitewide changes with little more than the press of a (virtual) button. Suppose you want to turn off Google ads for all pages, and soon afterwards switch them back on (as I've recently done). It's a cinch with Mambo. You can just as easily change the look of the site throughout. Or add a forum, a shop, a photo gallery. Contributors can write and edit web pages.

And yet, as so often with computing, the "simplicity" depends on doing things right. Make what can seem a small error, and you can have problems; at worst, these can result in the whole site ceasing to work, with nothing on each page but a short error message (happily, when you fix the error, the site springs back to life). Then even if do things perfectly, Mambo includes complexity; the worst I'm so far aware of is in the latest version, which is prone to creating unwanted, search engine unfriendly, duplicate URLs.

NB - this applied to Mambo before the Joomla developers forked off; I've read that Mambo has since included SEF URLs, tho maybe an imperfect method (I haven't tried). 

Mambo pages are compiled on the fly - as they're requested by
browsers, and their original URLs (addresses) reflect this: they're
stuffed with code, numbers, characters like "&". Looking like
gibberish to most humans, they can also be rather tough for search
engines to follow as they try navigating through sites.