Joomla!/Mambo Overview

At the moment this site is still on Mambo but when things quieten down I will be migrating across to Joomla! as I have a feeling it will have a stronger development path. I just wrote the following email to my friend in order to give him some information about Mambo/Joomla! so I figure why not post this up on the site so that if anyone else asks in the future the information in close at hand.

Joomla! is a completely open-source fork of Mambo. Mambo 4.5.2 code-wise is identical to Joomla! 1.0 except there's a few security/bug tweaks and different graphics are used. At the moment components/modules are compatible between the two systems but I can see a day when this won't be the case in the not too distant future.

Just a rundown on Mambo/Joomla! terminology, components are big pieces of functionality, modules are small blocks of presentation code and mambots are little background helpers that do a variety of things. The three pieces working together create the full system.
Mambo & Joomla! also provide the following functionality:
RSS feeds, search engine friendly URLs, users/groups, email notification and statistics.

Here are some useful Joomla!/Mambo links:

TMEdit/XHTML Suite: A very good editor for Joomla/Mambo:
http://www.xhtmlsuite.com/index.php?lang=en&option=com_content&task=section&id=4&Itemid=49

Mambo Portal: Lots of useful components & modules:
(you need to register, free, a bit of a pain but no spam)
http://www.mamboportal.com/

DOCMan: A not too bad (but sometimes a little flaky) document manager component:
http://www.mambodocman.com/


Zoom: Gallery component:
http://mamboforge.net/projects/zoom/