Well, as a seasoned Wordpress user for oh, about 5 days now, I thought I would write a bit of a spiel about how I have found Wordpress in comparison to Mambo (now known as Joomla!), the CMS I am using on my other site, Ms-Geek Dot Net.

Overall, I have found Wordpress much easier to work with than Mambo in terms of changing the “look” of the website and its anti-spam functionality. Sure, although both Mambo and Wordpress users can VERY easily add a new pre-packaged theme to change the appearance of their site, I have found customising the pre-packaged themes much easier in Wordpress than in Mambo (and there seems many more of them available). Customising pre-packaged themes isn’t for the rank newbie though in either case.

Mambo, on the other hand, has a lot more gadgety things available for a site than does Wordpress. I guess though, that the reason for that is that Wordpress is designed primarily to be a blog, and Mambo isn’t.

In terms of add-ons available for anti-spam functionality, Wordpress wins that race hands-down. I think it is because the developers HAD to address the issue, with Wordpress probably being one of the most popular packages available, and therefore most likely to be targetted by arsewipe spammers. Mambo, on the other hand, is a much less popular package, and less likely to be targetted, although, I have turned off comments and the guestbook on my Mambo site, as I was receiving spam and there was just no anti-spam modules available for the version that I was running with the type of functionality available in some of the Wordpress plugins I am using.

Of course, it is important to note, that if you are a bit of a code wizard, you could probably put something together yourself to deal with these issues on a per-site basis, but I’m not (although I wouldn’t call myself completely clueless either).

It is also important to note that with mambo plug-ins (or modules as they are called), it is 99% of the time a situation of plug and play, whereas with Wordpress, you are often required to get into either the stylesheet or the page .php to add a line or two to get the thing working. You do get specific instructions on where to put the code, don’t get me wrong, but for some real newbies, this is a stretch! (I still remember when the bios on a PC was a dark place to me, too terrified to go there, but now I frolic like a spring lamb changing settings when I need to, and sometimes when I don’t!).

So, with all that in mind, my recommendation for someone who’s not afraid to dabble a bit in stylesheets and adding lines of code (if you’re told what to do) into .php pages, I would definitely recommend Wordpress over Mambo.

If you’re a rank newbie and want to get yourself into blogging, I would say neither application is suitable until you gain some skills in code dabbling as well as understanding how content management systems work. I would say that you should go to somewhere like blogger.com, create a blog on their website, and learn about how they work. If you DO decide to get into one of the applications and need help, here’s the best information I can give you: GOOGLE IT before posting on help forums anywhere. You might just learn something all by yourself!

Update: I know I’m getting quite a few hits from people looking for more wordpress v mambo information. Check this post out also, as it gives more, later information. Oh, and thanks for stopping by!

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