Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial [Paperback]

Hagen Graf (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 2005

This book is a fast paced tutorial to creating a website using Mambo. If you have never used Mambo, or even any web content management system before, then this book will walk you through each step in a friendly and accessible way. From installation, to initial set up and content entry and then on to customization for your own look and feel, this book will get you to a stable and working Mambo based web site fast. You do not have to be an experienced web developer or designer to get a great looking site with a full set of functions using this book and Mambo. This book will guide you through every step. This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors and marketing professionals who want develop a fully featured web presence in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive web site.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This book focuses on taking you through the essential tasks to create a Mambo site as fast as possible. These essential tasks are explained clearly, with well structured step by step instructions. The book does not aim to cover every feature of Mambo, nor is it a comprehensive guide to extending Mambo. Almost everything in the book is accomplished without recourse to the underlying PHP code in which Mambo is written. The book is very readable and the author has a particularly chatty and engaging writing style.

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors and marketing professionals who want develop a fully featured web presence in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive web site.

About the Author

Hagen Graf

Hagen Graf was born in July 1964. Born and raised in Lower Saxony, Germany, his first contact with a computer was in the late seventies with a Radioshack TRS 80. As a salesperson, he organized his customers' data by programming suitable applications. This gave him a big advantage over other salesmen. With the intention of honing his skills, he joined evening courses in programming and became a programmer. Nowadays he works in his wife's consulting company as a trainer, consultant, and programmer (cocoate.com). Hagen Graf has published other books in German, about the Apache web server, about security problems in Windows XP, about Mambo, and about Drupal. Since 2001, he has been engaged in a nonprofit e-learning community called "machm-it.org e.V.", as well as in several national and international projects. All the projects are related to content management, community building, and harnessing the power of social software like wikis and weblogs. He chose Joomla! CMS because of its simplicity and easy-to-use administration. You can access and comment on his blog (bloghouse.org/en/hagen).

Product Details

• Paperback: 227 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (August 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811736
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811732
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,449,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The free documentation is better, October 14, 2005

By 

Michael Blyth (Jos, Nigeria) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial (Paperback)

Notes from a total newbie to Mambo: Maybe this is the best Mambo book available. I don't know as I haven't seen the others. However I was pretty disappointed with it. For starters, it's only 231 pages long, which isn't much for $40, but maybe that's inevitable for a book with a smaller audience. I was expecting a book with lots of detailed information but most of the book is either a rehash of the manual or a restatement of what is obvious from the menus themselves:

"Banner Name: Name of the banner

Published: Whether the banner is published or not

Impressions Made: Number of impressions to date

Impressions Left: Number of remaining impressions

Clicks: Clicks on the banner

% Clicks: Proportion of impressions to clicks."

Compare this with the (free) manual's description of the same:

"Impressions Made - This displays the number of times the banner has been shown on your site.

Impressions Left - This displays the number of impressions left to display if a limit has been set while creating or editing a banner.

Clicks - This displays the number of times that particular banner has been clicked on by a user of the site.

% Clicks - This displays the number of clicks as a percentage ratio to the number of impressions that have been made. 1% would mean for example, that 1 in every 100 people had clicked on the banner.

Published - This displays whether the banner is currently Published for display or not."

Want to know what the "Module Positions" menu does? I wanted to know and couldn't figure it out from the help box at first. Well, "module position" is not in the index. In fact, the only index entries for "module" are "module" and "module copying." The scrawny index has no entry for "menu" or "help", either. So it gets hard to find things. If there is a good explanation of the "Module Positions," I'm yet to find it.(BTW, I finally figured it out ... it's nothing but a table of position names and has nothing to do with the actual positioning. I think!)

The last three chapters of the book do go beyond the basics, though still with the unevenness and lack of detail. You can learn how to install a component, design a template, and write your own program extensions. The last is only 20 pages long, though.

Summary: The obscure remains obscure and the obvious is made doubly so. If, like me, you like to have a hard copy manual on hand, and you don't mind the price, you may be happy (after all, the previous 4 reviewers were very happy). If you're looking for something more, keep looking or at least browse the inside of the book before buying.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Part tutorial, mostly users guide, November 20, 2005

By 

Julian Rickards "jr" (Sudbury, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial (Paperback)

I have not used a CMS before, other than WordPress (that I consider to be a light-weight and focused CMS) so I decided to give Mambo a whirl but not without the help of this book. Unlike some other reviewers, the subtitle of my copy reads "A step by step tutorial" and so I read the book with that in mind.

There are a couple of minor problems with the book. It was originally written in German and translated to English. The translation is not perfect and a couple of sentences required rereading but this is a minor matter. The other problem is that one of the most useful tutorials is on how to install the German language module which, for a book that has been translated into English, doesn't make a lot of sense to keep. It would have been my wish to use this valuable space to provide other tutorials.

My review was focused on whether the book could help me download, install, set up, and use Mambo to build a Web site but unfortunately, it doesn't live up to my wishes. Some of the tutorials are good but for the most part, the largest chapter of the book reads more like a users guide than a tutorial and the last three chapters are for more advanced users.

Although the book does work as a decent users guide and it does appear to be better than Mambo's web site, this book could have had better tutorials.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars why bother?, February 23, 2006

By 

prime - See all my reviews

This review is from: Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial (Paperback)

I bought this book to research how to implement a new site on Mambo CMS. It basically was a copy of basic explanations that are on the mambo site, and only addressed the structure that is in place with default values on the test page. Why bother spending the money when all of the info is online? And why call it a tutorial, when it doesn't show you how to do anything, but rather just explains what each thing is supposed to do?

Also, and this is my fault for not thinking about it when I was buying, but 227 pages of computer book is not worth $40. Even if it were really good, which it's not.