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In my opinion Mambo is winning in the PR-field because they finally understand that development for the sake of development is a never ending cycle. To be fair, I believe they came to this understanding faster then most because of the commercial side of their business (CMS). When your customers tell you that they don’t care about your new features if it doesn’t benefit them, you sort of sit up and take notice.
I have worked with Mambo and XOOPS and I used the support forums for both and I find that both systems a basically equal in features (some better some worse..blah blah blah) however, Mambo does a better job with the finer points for the new users. Example, an iframe, simple to do if you know what your doing can be a nightmare if your new user. How does XOOPS handle this issue, well they tell you to download a module (that may or may not work) or someone gives you a piece of code to insert somewhere. Now how does Mambo handle this issue, well as part of their system they use something called a wrapper, this will do the same thing however, from a new user’s point of view the instructions are straight forward (idiot proof). This is only one example.
The bottom line (my opinion only) is Mambo has started to realize that sometimes the finer points are more important than new versions; they provide them with better customer satisfaction. Both systems have their pluses and minuses but if you review the support forums you usually never see in the Mambo forums, I have a blank screen after installing something or all my modules are gone or I can’t login to my system…pretty scary stuff for a new user and I bet one of the reason we lose a lot of new comers. Don’t get me wrong, Mambo has their problems as well but as I said I think they do a better job for the new user and isn’t that what we are trying to accomplish.
Another issue I find regarding a CMS, let’s face it people use a CMS because it allows them to do something, using a CMS for the sake of a CMS is not the primary purpose for most people. If you check the support forums again on this issue you will find people switch to another system because either the CMS won’t do what they want it to do or some other CMS does a better job at performing the task they wish to provide, so un-finished projects or incomplete projects appear to be the number one reason for users switching to another system.
Thanks
