I spent a lot of time working with the Mambo content management system on my Linux test server here, and yesterday installed it on a subdomain on my production hosting server.  The installation was not as simple as Mambo’s install documentation would have you believe, requiring that I set a whole bunch of directory permissions and fiddle with a configuration file.  I wrote up a little article about my experiences, and will be posting it to the site.  I have things up and limping, but but I’m not pointing anybody to it until I iron out some of the more obvious weirdnesses, two in particular:

• Designing a Web page template for Mambo is not trivial.  At least, it’s not trivial for somebody with my meager HTML and CSS experience.  CSS, especially, is wonky enough to give a programmer fits.  I haven’t yet figured out all the relationships and rules that determine what style will be applied where, and how defaults are supposed to work.  If you know of a good advanced CSS tutorial that goes beyond the simple stuff that’s all over the Web, I’d sure like to hear about it.
• The instructions for enabling search engine friendly (SEF) URLs in Mambo are unclear and incomplete, and might be just flat out wrong.  I haven’t been able to get SEF working on my test server or on the production server.  SEF is important if you want search engines to index your Mambo site, as most of them will discard a URL that looks like it’s pointing to dynamic content.

I’m still not 100% certain that I’m going to convert this site to Mambo.  I will go to an online CMS at some point, but I want to be more comfortable with whatever system I choose before I do the conversion, as it’s going to be a lot of work and I don’t want to go through it all more than once.  I’ll keep you posted.