For comments and thoughts on programming for the Mambo CMS and it’s branch: Joomla
Now there’s a misleading title but I had cause to ask a Mambo site to output some info without a template. Sadly it didn’t want to do that – although if you know another method, please leave a comment…
The official method is to call www.mysite.com/index2.php but that still parses the page and adds an alternate stylesheet and header information. It’s good, but not perfect.
It’s easy to add a newsfeed to a Mambo or Joomla website. The normal place for them is on the right hand column of a 3 column layout. In this example we’re doing just that.
Google is steadily building up it’s webmaster tools and winning over the hearts of webmasters. As covered in my Google Sitemaps and Verification post the feedback can be very, very useful.
I have run into problems though on Mambo and Joomla sites because they don’t throw true 404s so as far as GoogleBot knows every page is a good page. Google and Googlebot have given webmasters an incentive to change… access to the stats!
To get Mambo and Joomla to throw a 404 you need three things!
I’ve been using Link Vault on this blog and another site for while and the system seems to work well. I hadn’t put it on my hobby site because I hadn’t taken the time to create a module to place it on the site. However the site has a stack of pages so lots of opportunity to increase my vaultage.
I’ve just completed a small module I’ve written for Mambo 4.5.3 and Joomla 1 which will make it easy for users to add Link Vault to their sites. The module replaces Step 2 of the installation instructions…
I haven’t got involved in the politics behind the Mambo / Joomla split and personally I’d like to see them rejoin. I’ve no idea how likely that is. Right now I’m left sitting on the fence, not sure which way to go.
Looking at the minor irritations I have with the current system the deal breaker for me would be the issue of coding standards.
I’m collaborating on a set of components for the Mambo 4.5.3 site over at PropertyTalk. The first draft was written by the site owner and I’ve gone in an Mambo-ised them.