Mambo is an interesting beast. It took me a few hours before I sort of “got” the underlying design methodology, but once I did, everything got much, much easier to do. So, I’m going to try to explain it as I see it, since I never actually saw this explained anywhere.

I tend to work in a top-down manner. For web design, that means I design the homepage first, and put all of the menus into place. Then I go through the menus and fill in the content that each of them links to. So, I start at the top of the navigation tree and recursively work my way down to the bottom.

Mambo doesn’t work well with a top-down approach - instead, it fosters a bottom-up approach in which you create your content first and then link it all together.

Here’s the basic cheat-sheet to making a Mambo-driven site. The site encapsulates sections. Sections encapsulate categories, and categories encapsulate your content. The menu that was used to arrive at a section, category, or content item determines how the item is formatted.