We have a short little article that may help you evaluate Mambo and to help you determine the best CMS for your needs.

If you've come to this page, you have probably been surfing the web for hours, if not days, trying to find a trail of links that will lead you to the perfect CMS. You might have only just started your journey.

How do you determine which CMS is best for you?

There are a number ofsites to help you determine the answer to this question:

- mamboforge.net/demo- our own demo server

- www.cmsmatrix.org- a site where you can do side-by-side comparisons of many of the most popular and lesser known systems

- www.opensourcecms.com- a site that has many demos running or a large number of systems

But is trying out the demos and getting a "nice feeling" about a system enough?

The answer is probably 'no'. You need to ask a number of other questions to ensure that when you invest your time in committing to a system, you receive a profitable return:

* Is there a healthy development team (to support the core framework)?

* Is there a healthy developer community (to provide custom addons, templates, etc)?

* Is there a healthy user community (to provide help and support and to provide the momentum for continued development)?

We are pleased that Mambo has all three.

To help you compare various systems, look at the following:

* Check that releases are recent and timely, that downloads any not years old (have a look at http://mamboforge.net/projects/mambo/)?

* Check that there are quality community sites supporting custom development and news ( have a look at mamboforge.net or work through the results of a web search for 'Mambo CMS' ).

* Check that there are well support forums or other communication networks toallow users to get help and share ideas ( have a look at forum.mamboserver.com ).

We wish you well on your quest to find a great content management system. Mambo, while it is a great CMS, is by no means perfect. But we can guarantee that it is constantly improving.