New look and new sites for Mambo

Aug 17, 2008 at 01:27 PM

New Look & New Sites for Mambo

In July, we began the process of moving the Mambo family of web sites to new servers. To coincide with this change we also launched new web sites and a complete, new, Web 2.0 style look for the sites.

The Mambo project has always suffered from not having one definitive Mambo domain name. Over its 8 year history, Mambo has been variously referred to as Mambo Siteserver, Mambo Open Source (often abbreviated to "MOS") and just plain "Mambo". In the early days, the mamboserver domain name was secured but the project did not secure domains that would have been more appropriate for our CMS. In time, this left us with a family of web sites running on different domains.

For the past three years we have been using mambo-foundation.org as the primary domain, with "The Source" being the focus of development information, "Mambo Love" being the marketing and promotion site, and help, documentation, and the forums running under sub-domains. As the years passed and the sites grew, the information across our sites became more and more difficult to navigate. Duplication of content was occurring and it became clear that the structure of the sites was not handling growth. The sites did not have a uniform design and this caused confusion to Mambo users. This has now changed!

New Sites

The Mambo Foundation front page is the gateway to Mambo, although few people come to Mambo through that domain. It provides an overview of Mambo and what it can do for you.
Information about the non-profit Mambo Foundation and activities of the Board of Directors is now at http://about.mambo-foundation.org.
Mambo news, information and announcements, including announcements from our community, can now be found at http://mambo-news.org. This site also contains the Team Blog and our bookshop.
Our new Mambo Developer site at http://mambo-developer.org replaces "The Source" and contains the Mambo API, our bug and feature tracker, the SVN, and developer mailing lists. This is the central site for developer-related information.
All the Mambo documentation resources have been brought together under the umbrella of our new Mambo Support site at http://mambo-support.org. The FAQ's from the forum, help screens and more are now available in our knowledgebases and work is well underway for offering the knowledgebases in several different languages. Our wiki contains longer articles and step-by-step guides.

As the roll-out continues we will be launching new services - more about that later.

New Look

The new site design was created to bring a unified look and feel to the Mambo family of official project web sites. In designing the theme we kept three things uppermost in our minds:

The colours had to be different to previous Mambo designs while incorporating the trademark logo;
The style had to be uniquely Mambo;
The design had to be able to be easily applied to several different applications.

Each individual site has its own look and feel to it, while keeping uniformity with the whole. Each set of templates also had to be validating code.

All sites built with Mambo validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The templates themselves validate XHTML 1.0 Strict and are designed to be used with Mambo 4.7 once this is released. You can check the validation for yourselves:

The Mambo forums have been given a new theme, as has the API and knowledgebases. The Mambo Code forge and tracker will be updated shortly. The Mambo Manual wiki is currently being moved to a new server and will be updated with a new theme once this work is complete.

These changes are intended to make it easier for you to find information and easier for you to become involved in contributing to Mambo, should you wish to. We hope you like the changes!