Some of you might have noticed the new footer line on the website. Yes, for the past week, chette.com has been running on Mambo, an open source Content Management System (CMS).

Chette.com has been formerly using pMachine as its main engine. I had some reservations since the beginning -- the developers have released a commercial version of pMachine, a big sign that support for the free version will be affected. Sure enough, months after I have downloaded it, pMachine is still stuck on version 2.3.

The decision to finally make the switch came in late 2004, when comment spams started invading this website. Manually deleting each spam was becoming a chore, as there is no comment moderation in pMachine (nor were there any patches or fixes released, for that matter). This made me realize the importance of a stable support system and community, especially with the continuous emergence of new spam techniques and website viruses.

The Shortlist

There were two packages left in the shortlist: Tikiwiki, and of course, Mambo.

It is a personal choice not to include Nuke packages (no offense to the users of PostNuke and PHP-Nuke):

• I have this (maybe unfounded) fear that Nuke sites are a security risk waiting to happen,
• I am very uncomfortable with their administrative interfaces, and
• Sad to say, I have not been exposed to Nuke sites which have impressed me. Call me unreasonable, but this is one of my personal ways of really determining the ease of customization of a CMS package.