The team at Juicy Media are experienced developers of all things Mambo & Joomla.

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.  

Having developed advanced corporate websites using the Open-Source Content Management Systems such as Mambo and Joomla, Juicy Media can comfortably state that any functionality required by a custom development can be implemented into a CMS.

Since the early days of Mambo 4.0 there have been core components.

A Joomla component can be defined as a set of files that provide a specific primary function of a site producing, normally, 80-90% of the final output of a page.

In short, this means that components are used by Joomla to provide the main functionality of the core system. We have a content component, contacts components, polls component and many more within the core. These components when brought together by the Joomla framework provide the dynamic site that amazes the casual visitor.

In Mambo 4.5 the components idea was extended to allow 3rd Party developers to extend Mambo’s core functionality by designing, developing and integrating their own custom components. This opened the gateway that is today making Joomla such a useful framework for a website.

Some useful facts about Mambo and Joomla:

1. Is Joomla! a fork of Mambo? Some call it a fork. Some call it a spoon. Some call it an entire table setting. Whatever your philisophical persuasion, the facts are that Joomla is a continuation of the work of the Development Team which unanimously resigned from the Mambo project in August 2005.
2. Why start at Version 1.0? We decided to reset the version number to 1.0 to reduce the confusion that could be created by having similar version numbers between Joomla! and Mambo. It is not necessarily a reflection on the fact that the project is immature, but rather that it is new and will be different from Mambo. Other projects, such as Firefox, have successfully delivered mature Version 1.0 products.
3. How do the versions compare? Joomla version 1.0 is derived from Mambo 4.5.2.3 but includes many additional bug fixes and security patches. Joomla version 1.5 is an extensive refactoring of the API as is Mambo version 4.6 to its codebase. Both applications continue maintain a similar user inferface (look and feel), similar default component and module sets. Both Joomla 1.5 and Mambo 4.6 will include internationisation support. Joomla will use an easy-to-use 'ini' format for their translation files while Mambo uses the 'gettext' format. Joomla 1.5 will correctly support the UTF-8 character set. Joomla 1.5 also includes many new features such as additional authentication models (LDAP, Gmail, etc), xml-rpc client-server support. It also natively supports database drivers for MySQL 4.1+ (on PHP 5) and has improved support for MySQL 5 as well as the groundings to support other database engines.
4. Are patches for Joomla! and Mambo interchangeable? No. The two projects are maintained independently by different development teams.
5. Will Mambo addons continue to work in Joomla! ? Addons (templates, components, modules, mambots and language packs) designed for Mambo 4.5.2 will generally run on Joomla 1.0. It is possible that some Mambo addons will run on Joomla 1.5. Mambo addons designed for version 4.6 will likely not run on Joomla, nor will extensions designed for Joomla 1.5 run on Mambo.
6. Can I just patch my existing Mambo site to make it Joomla! ? No. The rebranding affects almost all files so it is not possible to patch just a few files.
7. Can I use my Mambo database for Joomla! ? Yes. Joomla! 1.0 will be able to use a Mambo 4.5.2 database. It's likely that Joomla! 1.5 will be able to use a Mambo 4.6 database, with appropriate upgrading, but at this stage we cannot be certain.
8. What happens in the future when Joomla! and Mambo diverge? That's a hard question to answer because we don't know.