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Issue 2

the Art of Joomla - Editorial

Joomla vs Mambo

(Originally published on www.joomla.org on 8 April 2006 – revised and updated)

I see a lot of questions about the difference between Joomla and Mambo. Many people that did not follow the saga that ensued during the split with Mambo seem to think that one is a spin-off of the other, or one is “the original and best” and the other a poor-man’s replica. While feature for feature, Mambo 4.6 and Joomla 1.0 are very similar (but diverging), the main differences lie in the heritage of the projects.

It is inadequate to suggest that a comparison can be done in one or two paragraphs, or with the typical throw away line of “try both and see”. Evaluating Open Source or even commercial software is a difficult process requiring good research and good information. I believe this is a fair and balanced representation of the history of both Mambo and Joomla to the best of my personal recollection and research.

For reference I joined the Mambo Development team in February 2003 and I have been involved in all the versions represented in the screenshots to the side except for the last pair.

Modern History – Mambo in the 21st Century

One can never deny ones’ roots, however turbid they may be. So this is a brief history of how Joomla came to be out of its Mambo roots.
Mambo was originally developed by a Melbourne (Australia) based company, called Miro, in 2000. It was spawned in an era when phpNuke reigned supreme in a community-site minded internet. To their credit, Miro correctly identified that there was a lack of substance for business oriented sites.

It is believed Miro borrowed heavily from the competing CMS offerings of the time, as open-source projects are known to do, but adding its own flavour by creating a unique separation of site and administration.

Miro publicly released its code under the names of Mambo Site Server and later Mambo Open Source at version 3 in April 2001 under the GNU GPL. From this time until the middle of 2002, Miro was the only developer of Mambo, contributing bug-fixes and security patches but not really adding to the feature sets. At the same time, during 2001, Miro also developed a commercial iteration of Mambo, and later released "Mambo 2002" in January of 2002. At that time Mambo 2002 and Mambo Open Source were still very similar.

Late in 2002, Miro was contacted by Robert Castley who saw great potential for the application, and was eventually appointed as project director. Castley took over the development of Mambo Open Source and progressed it to version 4 beta, having assembled a small team of keen and like-minded developers to support the project.

Early in 2003, Miro handed off the responsibility of the code fully to the Open Source project Development Team. It is at this time that work ended on the 4.0 series and the first major refactoring of the schema and code architecture were performed. Meanwhile, Miro continued work on its commercial counterpart independently of the Open Source project, and the two code-bases diverged rapidly. It is important to note that these versions were never compatible with each other.

Version 4.5 was born in December 2003 with enough changes to be fairly considered a fork of itself with most of the original Miro code having disappeared during refactoring. It is at this point that Mambo was placed on the radar and began to receive much recognition for its quality and increasing popularity.

In 2004 Linux Format awarded Mambo “Best Free Software Project” of the Year and Linux User and Developer named it “Best Linux or Open Source Software”. MamboForge.net was unveiled in March of 2004 following frustrations with the facilities provided at SourceForge.net, and also the growing requirement to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding third-party developer market. Above all other things, Mambo’s template offerings become the most prolific and the envy of any of the content management systems of the day.

In September 2004 version 4.5.1 was released with massive functional improvements and a refurbished administrator. It was the dawn of the "parameters" - for better or worse.

Following the resignation of Robert Castley in late 2004, and the appointment of his replacement Andrew Eddie (that's me), the Mambo Development Team and Miro decided to reunite and collaborate their efforts more formally. The Mambo Steering Committee was formed, made up of Miro executives and elected representatives from the Mambo Development Team.

In February 2005 version 4.5.2 was released making great efforts to improve features and stability without radically changing the look and feel of the interface.

2005 saw more major awards such as “Best Open Source Solution” and “Best of Show - Total Industry Solution” at LinuxWorld Boston and “Best Open Source Solution” at LinuxWorld San Francisco.

Work then began on version 4.5.3. which boasted international support for the now famous Mambo Administrator, fine grained access control and more.

Regretably however, in August 2005, a dispute developed involving the fulfillment of decisions within the Mambo Steering Committee. Miro wrote to development team with a "plans have changed, take it or leave it" letter. As fate would have it, some of the guys were in San Francisco at the time and none other than Eben Moglen walked up the stairs (literally). Heated email exchanges ensued, secret meetings and elections were uncovered and the drama continued for a short while.

Eventually the entire Core Team decided to sever ties with Miro and leave the project. We regrouped under the banner of Open Source Matters.
After a serious dust, polish and make-over, Open Source Matters gave birth to Joomla 1.0 in September 2005. Over the coming months, Mambo also reformed its own teams and support structures, abandoning the advanced work on the original version 4.5.3 and opting to continue to support the current stable code-base.

Mambo-Joomla Development

Following the split Joomla continued to regularly win awards, Mambo also picked up some for a time, with both being heavily based on the original 4.5.2 code-base that we wrote. Both projects became heavily involved in refactoring efforts. Mambo tended to release more often than Joomla, as compared to the mammoth work that version 1.5 turned out to be. To the best of my knowledge Joomla 1.0.13 and Mambo 4.6.x are not perfectly compatible although some third party developers do support both.

Joomla is also taking a different approach to continuing development which is driven by community input. This approach is seen in other great projects such as Mozilla. Goal setting is done based on what the community actually wants based on genuine feedback.

Communities Compared

There is now a huge difference between the Joomla and Mambo communities. Both projects have very similar online offerings with their respective web-sites. However, the Joomla online forum community is roughly ten times larger than Mambo. In addition it is estimated that the market share of Joomla is in excess of two million web-sites, with Mambo being around the one hundred thousand mark.

Joomla is also well supported financially and gives back to the community in many ways such as in the area of Joomla Days and international bug squashing events. Mambo simply does not have the financial or logistical resources to offer such things.

Probably most significant of all is that Joomla has cornered the third-party developers. There are simply more extensions, and more people writing them for Joomla as compared to Mambo.

These are significant metrics to examine when choosing any Open Source software.

Structure Compared

Internal structures are similar in some ways and different in others. The organisation structures are not terribly important in making a comparison of the products themselves. However, one major difference exists in the non-profit entities that protect the legal interests of the projects. The Mambo Foundation actually contributes to part of the governance structure to Mambo, is overall heavier and has a membership. Open Source Matters (the Joomla non-profit) is very light and provides no governance or leadership officially to the project. Joomla’s legal advice is provided by the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Centre) which notably includes Eben Moglen, a key figure in the GNU General Public License.

There are good and bad sides to both models. The up side to the Mambo model is that the community can give the leadership the boot if they are not happy with them. The downside to that is factions can damage the continuity of the project. Joomla has made significant inroads to separate the workers from the policy makers so that development continues regardless of heated discussions that might be taking place at a core level.

So How Do I Choose?

Even after this brief comparison, it could still be difficult to choose. It you are after features in the out-of-the-box download, toss a coin – really! If you are looking for slicker eye candy then Joomla wins hands-down.

If you are after reliability and stability then I believe Joomla is better for you. Your decision though may simply come down to the fact that there is an extension for Joomla but not Mambo (or that doesn’t work on Mambo). The availability of extensions for Joomla is rich and growing (over 2700 at the time of writing) whereas Mambo's equivalent directory is quite stagnant.

Joomla is also supported by some of the most famous supporters and advocates of the Open Source movement.

For developers, I firmly believe that the architectural improvements in Joomla 1.5 will outshine not only Mambo, but many other CMS projects in the same pack. The significant market share would also contribute to your decision about which one to invest time in. Joomla is in the league of the other big-guns such as Drupal and Typo3. At present the demand for services is out-stripping supply so there is a lot of room for growth in the Joomla developer industry, whether at the level of the hobbyist or the professional developer.

As a site owner, Joomla has more for you in the way the community pulls together (for example, through Joomla Days) and because of the market share, there are more people providing services for Joomla.

If you are choosing a CMS based on what you will be able to do with it in the future, then I believe Joomla is the choice because this is the name you are going to see competing in the Enterprise market.

Does this mean that Mambo is bad and Joomla is good? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. It simply means that Mambo is brilliant software, and the same people that made it brilliant in 2005 have now taken it to the next level in Joomla in 2008.

Inevitably we do come back to the throw away line I mentioned at the start, “try both and see”. Try them both, but select the total package (code + community + continuity) that is best for you.

Errata January 2009

Mambo has suffered from additional forking over the years.  Regretably the project now appears to be dead.  Apart from Joomla, MiaCMS seems to be the most promising remnant of the formerly great project.