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It’s been a while since I played around with Joomla, an offshoot of Mambo. Joomla is a CMS or content management system which can be used as a simple website or a complex corporate application. Out of curiosity, I installed Joomla last night. I wanted to see what changes have taken place since I installed Mambo a little over than a year ago.

If you ever wondered why the project forked? There’s a nice write-up on the split here. In summary, the developers of Mambo and Miro International, the company funding Mambo had a fallout. The Mambo developers left and created a new project based on Mambo 4.5.3.

What do I think about Joomla? At first glance, Joomla looks exactly like Mambo. I haven’t been around Mambo in a while, so I need more time to get familiar with the Joomla product. I am sure both applications will look identical for a little bit, but will diverge in their own identities.

I’ve used Mambo before as a front-end of my website after moving away from PHP-Nuke. I shortly abandoned Mambo due to performance issues and switched to WordPress. Since then, Mambo has added caching which improved page delivery. At the same time Dreamhost, my hosting company upgraded their backbone links.

My website is much faster now. But, I am very happy with WordPress. Here’s the Joomla demo I installed last night with default sample data. FYI, I am using the Geo-Synch template.