In an earlier blog I had discussed as to when a PHP CMS is a better option than a Java CMS. TheServerside.com had later referred to the blog in the thread Ask TSS: Do any Java CMS/Portals match the PHP ones?

For over an year and half, I have used the Mambo CMS and have found it to be user-friendly and feature-rich. The community around Mambo was very active and not only did the core project move forward regularly but even the add-ons and third party components space was active. In August 2005 Mambo got the "Best Open Source Solution" award from LinuxWorld and the future looked bright for Mambo. However things suddenly have changed drastically.

A dispute emerged because of the creation of the Mambo foundation. The Mambo foundation site says that the Mambo Foundation is a non-profit organization established by Miro International to manage the development of the Mambo project, to promote Mambo worldwide and to co-ordinate the efforts of the community. The Mambo Foundation is made up of a Board of Regents who preside over the various project groups within the Mambo development organizational structure.

However the development team was not happy with the way the foundation was created and decided to break away from Mambo. In their site (http://opensourcematters.org), the development team says that "We, the development team, have serious concerns about the Mambo Foundation and its relationship to the community. We believe the future of Mambo should be controlled by the demands of its users and the abilities of its developers. The Mambo Foundation is designed to grant that control to Miro, a design that makes cooperation between the Foundation and the community impossible."

I won't go into the details of the dispute but this dispute sure has rocked Mambo and already many sites proclaim that Mambo is dead. Mambo's loss has been Drupal's gain with users now considering Drupal instead of Mambo for future projects. A provider of Mambo components has already moved to Drupal and has posted a comparison of Mambo and Drupal. Drupal is a very competent CMS but if we are to rely on the voting at opensourcecms.com , Drupal isn't as popular as Mambo.