|
Mambo (formerly named Mambo Open Source or MOS) is a free software / open source content management system (CMS) for creating and managing websites through a simple web interface. Mambo is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)Version 2. It is written with the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database.
In this tutorial we will cover how to install Mambo on a local machine running in an Apache/MySQL/PHP (AMP) environment. We will not cover the installation of AMP here; you can find a walkthrough of installing the XAMPP package here . XAMPP is a free software package that includes PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc. and is a quick way to get yourself a working AMP development environment.
Since in this tutorial we are only dealing with creating a local installation for testing purposes, rather than covering how to deploy and set up Mambo on a remote web server.
The steps to install and configure Mambo are simple:
1. Download and extract the Mambo files.
2. Copy the files to the web server root.
3. Step through the screens of the Mambo web installer.
4. Create another, less powerful database user to run the site under.
5. Remove the installation directory.
6. Test it out!
Let's get started. |
Learning Mambo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website
ISBN 978-1-904811-62-6
*Publisher*Packt Publishing
Author(s) Douglas Paterson
Reprinted with Permission.
|
Downloading Mambo
The latest version of Mambo can be downloaded from http://mambo-code.org.
There is a link to this page from the Download Mambo link on the homepage of the mambo-foundation.org web site, http://mambo-foundation.org.
Mambo Lite and Complete
From version 4.6 of Mambo onwards, Mambo comes in two flavors, Complete and Lite. Mambo Complete is the full Mambo package, with all the standard components and templates already included. Mambo Lite is a cut-down version of the full Mambo package, intended for people who know they don't want all the features of Mambo straight away. The Lite package is missing a number of the standard components and templates, but still has enough for you to run a functional Mambo site. |
|
Importantly, Mambo Lite contains the Content component, which drives the content management functionality of Mambo, and is the main focus of this article. Wherever we use a feature of Mambo that is not included in the Mambo Lite package, we will highlight it. All the things included in Mambo Complete but not in Mambo Lite can be downloaded and installed from Mamboxchange Mambo code forge site. So, you are not cutting yourself off from Mambo's full potential by installing the Lite version, but it does mean you will have to do some more work to get extra parts installed.
In this article, since we are taking our first steps, we will work with the Complete package so that we can get a picture of everything that's available in standard Mambo.
Should you choose to install and work with the Mambo Lite package, you will find that installation steps are identical.
You will find that you can download in each package in a variety of compressed formats, like ZIP (.zip extension), GZIP (.tar.gz extension), etc. We will grab the ZIP file for the Complete package. It is a larger file than the GZIP version.
Extracting Mambo
Once you have downloaded Mambo, extract the contents of the Mambo ZIP archive to the the root of your c:\ drivehard drive..
If you don't have a tool for extracting the files, you can download an evaluation edition (or buy a full edition) of WinZip from www.winzip.com.
There are also free, and powerful, extracting tools such as ZipGenius (http://sourceforge.net/projects/zipgenius/http://www.zipgenius.it/index_eng.htm) and 7-Zip (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/) among others.
In the Mambo folder, you will find a number of subfolders; some of these include:
- components: Contains the PHP code for the components that will make up your Mambo site. Components are the essence of Mambos operation. We will start looking at them as soon as we've got Mambo installed!
- modules: Contains the PHP code for Mambo's modules. Modules are 'mini-functionality' units and usually provide snippet views of components.
- mambots: Contains the PHP code for Mambo mambots. Mambots are "little" plugins that hook into various parts of the system, and perform various tasks like filtering or preparing outputa kind of "filter".
- language: Contains language files that allow the language of Mambo's interface to be changed.
- images: Contains images used in the display of the Mambo site. This is where images used in your pieces of content will go.
- templates: Contains the Mambo templates. The use of templates allows you to completely change the look of a PHP-NukeMambo site with a click of a button. Within each template folder is the CSS for that template, along with images used by it.
- includes: Contain the core code that powers Mambo.
- administrator: Contains code to power the administration area of your site.
Putting Mambo Files into the Web Server Root
In this article, we are going to use two installations of Mambo. The first will install the sample data, and will be accessed with the followingis URL,once we have installed Mambo:
http://localhost/mambo/
The second installation will be blank; it will have no sample data and we will work with this to create our example site, Zak Springs. This installation will be accessed via http://localhost/zaksprings/. For now, we'll concentrate on the first installation.
The first thing we need to do is to copy the folder containing the extracted Mambo files into our web server root directory ((\xampp\htdocs\ if you are using XAMPP). Once you've copied that folder, rename it to mambo, and we're ready to go.
We will refer to the mambo folder in the web server root as the 'root of our Mambo installation'. Once the Zak Springs site is created, the zaksprings folder that will contain its code and will be the root of that Mambo installation. The fact that we have two installations should not cause confusion.
Installing Mambo
Open up your web browser and navigate to http://localhost/mambo/. You should see the following screen:
This first screen shows the status of a number of settings required to install Mambo. When a setting has a value that could prevent or compromise the Mambo installation, it is shown in red. If you scroll down the screen, you will see the write-access of the folders in the Mambo installation:
On your local machine, the most of the settings in the Directory and File Permissions section will show as Writeable. This is not likely to be the same when you attempt to install Mambo on web -hosting server, since that will have different permissions. Some of Mambo's operations requires write-access to the filesystem, which means that PHP must have write-permission to the file-systemfilesystem (for consistency). On a typical web server, PHP will have limited write-access to the filesystem, but this is not a problem that we will likely experience on our local machines.
Everything looks fine on the preinstallation check, so go ahead and click the Next button. The next screen shows us the license agreement for Mambo. We have to check the box to accept the license agreement and click the Next button before we can continue:
Database Setup
The third screen in the web installer is where we set up the details of our database.
We need to specify:
- The name of the server that the database server is running on (usually localhost unless you know otherwise).
- A MySQL user account that will be used to access the database (usually root unless you know otherwise), and the password to go with this database user account. Many MySQL installations have the root password left blank. If you don't know the password for the root account to MySQL, it's probably blank!
The default name of the database we want to create is mambo.
A table prefix for all the tables in the database. This is something added to the front of the name of each table in the Mambo database, to make the table names a bit more "unique". This means that the Mambo tables can live in a database along with another application (some web hosts may restrict the number of databases you are able to create) without the name of any table clashing with the name of a table from another application. We'll leave this at the default value of mos_.
There are three further options: Drop Existing Tables, Backup Old Tables, and Install Sample Data. Drop Existing Tables and Backup Old Tables are used if you are creating a new Mambo installation into a database that already has one.
The third option is Install Sample Data - we will leave it checked. This will install some sample information into will install "something" (suggestion: placeholder data or sample information) into our Mambo database, so that we've got things to look at as we take our first steps.
Once you've entered your database details here, click the Next button to continue. A dialog box will popup checking if you've entered your settings correctly. If you think you have, click OK.
The next screen prompts you for the name of your Mambo site. This name will appear in the title of pages from the site, in the subject of emails sent from the site, and so on. We'll just enter Mambo Site for now. After entering the site name, click on Next to proceed.
Site Details
The next step of the web installer is where you confirm the details of your site, and the details of a Super Administrator account. The Super Administrator is an account with ultimate power over your Mambo site, and will be used to do most of the configuration work on setting up the Mambo site..
The URL that will be used to access the site, and the Ppath on your machine to the Mambo installation are already provided forto you.
You also have to provide an email address for your Super Administrator account. This is an account with ultimate power over your Mambo site, and will be used to do most of the configuration work on setting up the Mambo site. Put your own email address into the Your Email field.
Next you have to provide a password for the Super Administrator account. The account is called admin, and it may be tempting as it maybe to enter admin for the password., But bear in mind that you had better remember to change ithat before you actually put your site live. One thing with Mambo is that the place for the administrators to log on is the same for virtually every Mambo site on the Internet, and if you've still got that Super Administrator account with the username of admin and the password of admin, then it wont take long before someone else has taken control of your site. It is however, possible to change the name of this account later.
A random, strong, password is suggested for you. If you don't want to change that, make a note of it! If you do change the password, make a note of it!
Once you've entered your email address and decided on the password, click Next to move on.
Your installation is complete. The name of the Super Administrator account and its password are displayed, along with a form for you to register your Mambo installation. This is not required, but will help to give the creators of Mambo a better idea of exactly what people are intending to do with the system.
You now have two choices, view the front end of the site from the View Site link, or have a nosey roundabout way through the Administration area link. We'll stick with the front end for now, so click the View Site link.
Testing the Installation
(to be completed)
Added by