Mambo Lite and Complete

From version 4.6 of Mambo onwards, Mambo comes in two flavors, Complete and Lite. Mambo Complete is the full Mambo package, with all the standard components and templates already included. Mambo Lite is a cut-down version of the full Mambo package, intended for people who don't want all the features of Mambo straightaway. The Lite package lacks a number of the standard components and templates, but still has enough for you to run a functional Mambo site.

Importantly, Mambo Lite contains the Content component, which drives the content management functionality of Mambo, and is the main focus of this book. All the things included in Mambo Complete but not in Mambo Lite can be downloaded and installed from the MamboXchange site. So, you are not cutting yourself off from Mambo's full potential by installing the Lite version, but it does mean you will have to do some more work to get extra parts installed.

If you choose to install and work with the Mambo Lite package, you will find that installation steps are identical.

You will find that you can download each package in a variety of compressed formats, like ZIP (.zip extension), GZIP (.tar.gz extension), etc. We will grab the ZIP file for the Complete package. It is a larger file than the GZIP version.

Extracting Mambo

Once you have downloaded Mambo, extract the contents of the Mambo ZIP archive to the hard drive.

In the Mambo folder, you will find a number of subfolders; some of these include: