So, I finally made the decision and moved one of my websites from PHPnuke to Mambo [link].
I have all the basic functionality and kept most of the data and users from the old site. I’m pleased with it.
How did I do it?
First I did some research on the functionality of Mambo and Joomla. How easy can I customize it, what about add-ons. Are there add-ons like photo gallery, bulletin board, attendance record, etc. Answer; Yes, but a lot of them are still in Beta and a lot are moving from Mambo to Joomla, there are also a lot of site templates available. Most of them are fixed width and I am looking for a variable width version.
Next I tried it out on a test website. I migrated the old data, tried bulletin boards, photo galleries and other add-ons.
- There is a add-on available for if you want to migrate data from PHPnuke to Mambo (ezPHPnuke). It worked good, it’s still Beta.
- As a bulletin board I used Simpleboard, that is good and stable.
- As a Photo Gallery I used Zoom. That is also still in Beta.
- Other add-ons I tried were a newsletter add-on, an attendance record, other bulletin boards and all kinds of site templates.
The only question is; shouldn’t I have moved to Joomla? Well, I don’t know. I tried Joomla and the version I tried didn’t work. Instead of trying to get it to work I tried Mambo and that worked in one go.
Joomla originates from Mambo and at the moment most of the add-ons work on both versions. That will change in the future and maybe I will move to Joomla if the add-ons are no longer supported.