Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 227 pages
• Published by: Packt Publishing August 27, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1904811736
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1904811732
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Description
This book is a fast paced tutorial to creating a website using Mambo. If you’ve never used Mambo, or even any web content management system before, then this book will walk you through each step in a friendly and accessible way. From installation, to initial set up and content entry and then on to customization for your own look and feel, this book will get you to a stable and working Mambo based web site fast. You don’t have to be an experienced web developer or designer to get a great looking site with a full set of functions using this book and Mambo. This book will guide you through every step.

The book begins by introducing Mambo and concepts behind content management. Then the installation of Mambo, and its supporting software [Apache/MySQL/PHP] is covered clearly and simply. Once you have the installation up and running, we then take a tour of Mambo as it appears out of the box, to familiarize ourselves with how it works and what is what. As you take the tour, your own ideas for what you need in your new website begin to crystallise around what you can see Mambo is capable of.

We then build our web application, using the features of Mambo that are essential to our purpose. We try not to spend time on things that don’t matter at this point. Once we have a base version of our site up, we then learn how to change its appearance and feature set to suit our particular requirements, including bringing it into line with an established corporate identity. At the end of the book we show how, if you have the skills and the need, you can add your own extensions to Mambo.

Publisher Description
This book focuses on taking you through the essential tasks to create a Mambo site as fast as possible. These essential tasks are explained clearly, with well structured step by step instructions. The book does not aim to cover every feature of Mambo, nor is it a comprehensive guide to extending Mambo. Almost everything in the book is accomplished without recourse to the underlying PHP code in which Mambo is written. The book is very readable and the author has a particularly chatty and engaging writing style.

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors and marketing professionals who want develop a fully featured web presence in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive web site.

Reader Reviews
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 twenty 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.