This has a few implications - an efficient design methodology is for you to first create your section and category hierarchy in a way that mimics your website’s navigational hierarchy. Once that’s done, you can start putting content into your categories. And once that’s done, you can make the menus that your users will click to get to your content. And remember - the menu determines the format.

This is a powerful approach in that you’re separating content from presentation, something that computer types get all excited about. Your content is your content — the menu parameters determine how it’s presented, and what modules will be shown.

Which brings me to, you guessed it, modules. Modules are the fluff that goes along with a webpage and add value to it — search, most recent items, stuff like that. The modules that are shown on a page are dependent on the menu that your user used to get to the page.

Again, this is a powerful approach, and again, it separates content from presentation. For example, you might have one menu that takes you to all of your news items, arranged newest to oldest, and with a search box shown. You might have another menu item that takes you to the most five recent news items, with a search box and a box of archives. Same content, different presentation.

So, to recap: Mambo fosters a bottom-up approach in which you create content first, decide how you want to present it second, and finally, set up menus to let the user access that presentation. This is a bit different from the way I’m accustomed to working, but it's got a ton of power.