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Mambo Manual is a community-driven wiki project. The site provides assistance forusers and acts as a supplement to the documentation resources provided by the MamboFoundation.
Mambo Manual is unique: This is the first time the Mambo project has had a wiki forcommunity development of documentation and help articles. This has been requestedmany times over the years, but never implemented. The wiki provides a way for everyMambo user to contribute to the project. Mambo Manual is another step towards thegoal of having the best and most complete documentation of any open source CMS --and to have it available in many different languages.
There are currently well over 100 articles in the wiki, ranging from information fornewbies to coding hints. The site also includes an excellent Glossary of Terms forMambo. While the current contents are in English only, work has already started ontranslating the items into Dutch and Spanish.
The project is built on the open source MediaWiki system and all content is free touse under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Shar eAlike 2.5. While thesite is being run outside of the Mambo Foundation, the manual has been gifted to theproject and as long as Mambo is active, the wiki will continue to grow.
The second site to launch this week was Mambo-Extensions.com. The Mambo communityhas, for a long time, been in need of a user-friendly directory of extensions forthe popular content management system. While a large number of extensions exist,they are not kept in one central location, they are maintained to various levels,and they are sometimes a bit arcane in description. The lack of an easy-to-useresource for identifying which extensions are available, current and useful is acommon complaint of users  particularly those new to the system.
The Mambo-Extensions site provides easy access to a central repository ofinformation. With a simple hierarchical directory, the site collects and organizesMambo components, modules, mambots and other useful tools into a logical structurethat makes finding what you need a straightforward matter. Users are able to add newextensions, review and rate extensions and report extensions with problems. Links todownloads are provided for all extensions in the directory.
The site is free of charge for registration and listing and is open to allextensions, whether Open Source or proprietary.
These two new sites are evidence of a larger trend which sees the Mambo Open SourceCMS community re-vitalized and increasingly active. The community has beenexperiencing steady growth over the last six months and is poised for a comebackfrom the brink brought about by a contentious fork in the GPL code set in the Fallof 2005.
Visit the Mambo help wiki at http://www.mambo-manual.orgVi sit the Mambo extensions directory at http://www.mambo-extensions.co m
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