[Glastonbury] Re: Mambo help

[Henry Bennett]

Hi Greg,

One of the beauties of the Mambo approach is that you don't need to get deep
down into all the PHP / HTML / LAMP stuff unless you really need to. 

Mambo is extremely modular in that once you have the core up and running the
additional functionality is provided by add-in modules, templates and code
snippets called mambots. The trick is knowing which one to use. I found I
installed a module (after working out the issues) found I didn't think much
of it and though trial and error eventually got the right one for me. These
can all be downloaded from http://mamboforge.net/ and other places.
www.Mambers.com is a good place to go for support and advice. 

Generally there were few times when I had to get into the code and this was
generally to do with installer code being tied to a specific version of
mambo (which revs pretty quickly). The forums normally guide you to the
lines you need to tweak.

I found that once I'd got my head around the concepts it was pretty straight
forward. And I know little about SW...HW is my thing.

If you getting into HTML and XHTML then likelihood is that you want to
change the look and feel of the site. There are hundreds of templates out
there which should allow you to get an off the peg solution. Some for free,
some for fee.

There were a couple of gotchas. The first is safemode (whatever that is) and
the second was that some installers gave ownership of the files to apache
and I had to get my hosting outfit to assign them back to me before I could
mod them.

In short Greg, if you've got this far then persevere. You almost at the top
of the hill and when you get there the view is great!

Cheers, Henry

PS - it's a caving site. Cavers rescue splunkers.

-----Original Message-----
From: glastonbury-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:glastonbury-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Greg Browne
Sent: 24 May 2005 11:34
To: Henry Bennett; glastonbury at mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: [Glastonbury] Re: Mambo help

Henry

Having got past the install phase, to the 'making it actually useful'
phase, I'm beginning to think that you are far too modest!

There is a good beginners guide at
http://www.netshinesoftware.com/mambo-tutorial.html which I'm working
through. Templates seem to be at the core of making this useful though
and the suggestion is that you need to know PHP and XHTML. HTML I'm
quite happy with but PHP - never used it myself! Did you need to get
to grips with PHP and XHTML?

Your spelunkers site looks excellent www.speleophilippines.com and is
inspiring me to persevere, but the time this is taking is worrying.

Regards Greg

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