Just took a look, and the word "mambots" triggered a thought. Is Joomla a fork of Mambo or not? The admin section certainly looks like it - and Mambo failed to work for me under the latest MySQL and PHP, which is why I abandoned using it.

I can't recall offhand what exactly was in the download link but I did follow the path of least resistance and picked something that wasn't a beta... %) I used to work with a developer whose most joyous event was to be able to install the latest bleeding edge pre-alpha versions of squid while it was being developed, and it was my most joyous event after each of his updates to uninstall it and put that last semistable version back on... %)

So I figured that what I had was stable. And since I've now got it installed I may as well learn to tame the beastie. Anyway - are the issues I raised not in the stable version as well? They are no biggies, mainly they are useability issues which can be worked out by the user, but which should probably be looked at in the future as wishlist items at least...

I'm learning as I go, and as I said I seem to find XOOPS easier to get along with than mambo so I'll stick with what I find easiest to work with. I'm a bit of an older dog being very close to my half century so it takes me a bit of time to get stuff, but eventually I do get it... %)

Thanks everyone who's replied, I very much appreciate the feedback and responses, and as I'm browsing around the forums here I'm finding a lot of useful info. It's almost midnight here and I still have to try and write about 1000 words to add to a book I'm writing so I probbaly won't respond for about the next six or so hours, but I will be back to this forum and your replies tomorrow.

Thanks again all!

My install had the older version in it and 2.0.13-to-2.0.14 update files. Yes it was an official download from here. I've installed Mambo but their spiffy software still hasn't caught up to the latest MySQL or PHP apparently, and that meant that half of the cms failed to work, and I couldn't be bothered to uninstall my backend stuff so I looked around and found xoops, which as I said quite makes sense to me, much more than mambo's structures did.

I'll keep going and see if I can't haxxor my way through - I have a definite application in mind and I know where I want to be, just not clever enough yet with this stuff to make it happen...

Hmmm I like xoops, it kind of makes sense to me. I believe I have the latest version (it came with the update in the package, install, then copy the update, then run it, seems to have worked) but I have a few useability issues with it, being a total PHP/MySQL n00b:

Dropdown lists (such as the group selector in the blocks admin menu) that revert to a default every time the page reloads. That sux, you know how long it takes to make a change, test the change, then reload the admin menu page, then you have to reselect the group you were working with and wait for the page to reload... I realise that on the same network this is a trivial amount of time but because my server is on the end of a slow ADSL link this is sheer torture, it takes me 3 - 5 times longer to do anything.

The above is not a problem confined only to that blocks menu by the way - 90% of control items items, you select something from a list, wait for the page to reload, make your changes, hit submit, wait for the page to reload, select the desired item from the list, wait for the page to reload... Once I get a bit better at this I can probably create a "memory" table in the database which will remember the state I want each page in and some code to put the < default > next to the line I want, but that's probably a clumsy way of doing it. But sticky settings for admin pages is a definite wishlist item...

And - speaking of that blocks menu. I set a block to not display for registered users, then set it to display for anonymous users - when the blocks admin page reloads the registered users have it set to visible again. If I then set their visibility to no, anonymous users lose visibility again.

That is mega annoying because then I have to go to groups permissions and make the block inaccessible to registered users, webmasters, and every other user group except anonymous, and you know what I feel when the page reloads a default "create group" page instead of letting me continue to edit.

Also, surely permissions and visibility settings should not be like that? I can understand that there could be a hierarchy but this is just a one to one correspondence - one off, all off or one on, all on.

And that leads to the second thing - if I then make a mistake somewhere else in the blocks labyrinth, I can no longer log in because stuff - you know, relatively important stuff like the login block - vanishes due to my not getting the visibility thing or whatever, and then I'm stuffed as I can't log back in. (Yeah I am probably doing something stupid but at the least this is one block that should NEVER be allowed to be invisible, nyet?)

Working from two machines seems to be the only way I can avoid having to re-install, and is not really satisfactory, but I'm blowed if I could figure out what field in what table I needed to change to undo whatever I'd done...

So - some blocks should just be hardcoded to never vanish, and the permissions/visibility setting things seem to be a little anti-intuitive. Or else I am. %)

Or: I tried downloading a few themes but they are zipped and XOOPS refuses to open zip archives, that's a bit rough because it also isn't quite what's expected. Either XOOPS should open the format that contributors submit their themes in, or else contribtors should be asked to contribute in a format that XOOPS can handle?

And some modules that I've tried to install crash during installation, leaving a file not found or some such error in the list of installed modules - and they then can't be uninstalled any more. There's probably some simple ju-jitsu I can do to the tables but again - it's not obvious to a newbie...

I realise these are really newbie questions and I've probably missed the answers to many of them in my brief scrabble through the manual but some of these things are just not expected behaviour...

Here - one last "does not work as expected" issue that I noticed just now: When I ceated that HTML block in the admin control panel to put a disclaimer in the right column for anonymous users only, I had to use the html < p > tag to make newlines because the editor doesn't insert a tag each time I put a cr/nl in the text. So I come to this text editor (which looks like the same editor) and put the < p > tags in because I want linefeeds - and get double linefeeds because in this case the editor handles a newline the expected way, which is now the way I <b>don't</b> expect it to work given my experience with the block editor... hehehe...

I'm running whatever the latest downloads from PHP and MySQL are, under Windows for the present because I'm stuck with that, and IIS 5 as the httpd.

I'm not too distressed by all that because I know I'll get used to it, and will keep on figuring it out, but meanwhile any tips are welcome.