Why Xaneon Switched from Mambo to Drupal

Xaneon, a group of former hardcore Mambo developers explain why they switched from Mambo to Drupal:

Mambo has, for a long time, been ahead of competing CMS projects with regards to marketing. Mambo's public image is pretty, appealing and very marketable to management. Mambo has no doubt benefited from the sponsoring company and trademark owner Miro's advertising dollars in this regard.

...Now we come to the real meat of the matter. During our sojourn into the dark art known as Mambo SEF, we've necessarily become quite familiar with the internal workings of Mambo. To be candidly honest, it's not exactly impressive. Mambo is a very limiting design...

...Now we come to the real meat of the matter. During our sojourn into the dark art known as Mambo SEF, we've necessarily become quite familiar with the internal workings of Mambo. To be candidly honest, it's not exactly impressive. Mambo is a very limiting design...

Drupal's architecture, in comparison to Mambo's, is like a breath of fresh air. First off, reading through the core code was a pleasant experience: it's not only cleanly designed, and with extensibility constantly in mind; it's also well commented and documented. The design is incredibly flexible from the view point of an add-on developer coming from Mambo: there is no need for separate "components", "modules" and "mambots", as one Drupal module can perform the tasks of each, and much more besides. There is a general-purpose, all-pervasive "hook" system in place, allowing modules to override functionality in the entire lifecycle of content objects (known as "nodes" in Drupal), as well as perform actions at certain points in the handling of page requests.

Let's just say the list of goodies Drupal delivers us is pretty long. We haven't even discussed Drupal's templating system (keywords: XHTML, CSS, total customizability, and optionally, Smarty) or the unlimited content hierarchies you can create with the built-in Drupal module called, appropriately enough, "taxonomy".

We could go on for two dozen pages. It wouldn't be difficult at all. But we don't need to convince anyone, and our reasons aren't necessarily reasons why someone else would switch. It would be silly to get religious about something like a content management system. As always, just pick the right tool for the job at hand. For us, that has for now in most cases proven to be Drupal.

And I say: Damn straight.