Leading Open Source CMS: Mambo versus Drupal - A Comprehensive Comparison

Mambo and Drupal are both feature-rich leading Open Source CMS (Content Management System). We presently use Mambo on our corporate site.

Mambo has always been the poster boy for ease of installation and newbie friendliness, not to mention the marketing dollars of Miro. Mambo was largely driven by Miro along with a core of volunteer developers.

Drupal has been a community driven project from start. However as purely community driven projects go, it didn’t have much advertising dollars to spend. So it has always been a low key presence. However that doesn’t reflect on its true capabilities.

Miro recently took control over Mambo causing the unhappy “core-team” to fork Mambo.

In this light it is interesting to review the differences between two leading Open Source Content Management System.

Xaneon, a company specializing in developing mambo extensions, has written an excellent article citing the reasons they switched to Drupal.

The key points from the article are:

Mambo has better look and feel and easy to configure for the first time. It has better add-on(extensions, modules, templates etc.) management.
BTW: This is something which many Open Source products need to improve upon including WordPress which powers this site.

Mambo is not very plugin-author friendly as it doesn’t provide very many hooks into the core. I think however that can be easily remedied.

Drupal is more cleanly designed with extensibility in mind and more flexible.

Drupal provides a standard high-level API for developing extensions and making it easier to extend Drupal in a standard way with uniform look-and-feel.

Drupal provides better support for internationalization through i18n module.

Drupal has better support of Search-Engine-Friendly URLs in core and through modules.

Drupal supports multiple sites with a single installation with fine-grained access control and ability to selectively share configuration settings and database tables.

Drupal comes with better templating system.

The authors concluded that Drupal is much more productive in creating and managing multiple sites with unique look-and-feel.

I am already experimenting with Drupal and I tend to agree with the conclusions above.