Testing Some PHP CMS software: Mambo and eZ publish

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon installing demos of Mambo and eZ publish. Mambo was easy to install, but I had a hard time understanding the administration interface. eZ publish didn't install at all on my server hosted at 1and1, but was ok on my home machine. I was put off by that, and also the surprisingly large size of eZ publish's files.

The premise of installing a big, feature-rich CMS like Mambo or eZ publish is very appealing to me, because it promises less work that I've done many times before. When I do content management, it's much more bare-bones than a genuine CMS. Mambo and eZ publish are in a separate category: professional (enterprise, even?) CMS, as opposed to single-use, ad hoc CMS.

Along with professional CMS comes professional complexity. You have to start thinking about how you can wrap the development of your site around your CMS instead of leaving building the site first and saving CMS concepts until the end. The functionality is already programmed; unless you want to reprogram it, you'd better be prepared to accept it.

My goal with setting up the two demos was to get a better sense of what each system offered, and possibly get some insight into how I could customize either one for an upcoming project. I installed Mambo once before, but never did anything with it. This time around, I was extremely impressed by how simple the installation process was. It's a step-by-step sort of thing with a pleasant design, two things that go a long way toward making a good impression. Once the installation finished and I started mucking around in the admin interface, I got tripped up by the terminology-- you've got modules, but also sections and categories and menus. I'm sure this will get better the more I use it, but from the very beginning I had several moments of staring at the screen and running through all the dropdown menus trying to guess the location of something I wanted to change. I get the impression that I'll end up hiding, disabling, or otherwise ignoring a lot of Mambo's flexibility over content and layout, if only because I won't necessarily be needing it.

ez Publish was much tougher, and in the end I had to give up. I think this is mostly due to the configuration of my server at 1and1, which doesn't seem to have the AcceptPathInfo option set in their Apache config. I've seen other people mention they had problems with eZ publish on 1and1, so it's probably not the software. Still, there's that filesize issue. There's close to 50 Mb of files in that thing! And about 93 tables in the MySQL database! It just doesn't seem right, no matter how much flexibility that brings. eZ publish's default site after the install is much more sparse and simple than Mambo's, but their installation wizard is well designed and from the brief look I had at the administration interface, it's more straightforward than Mambo's.

opensourcecms.com is the place to find all the major and minor CMS software for PHP/MySQL environments. One other I saw there that seemed to have potential was Jetbox One, but a similar AcceptPathInfo issue prevented me from a successful install.

In an ideal world I'd love to work with all these systems under the comfortable climate of my own server, where I can fix Apache problems directly and give each program the environment it deserves. But most of the time you have to make do with what's available, and in that respect Mambo seems to have the edge.