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Mambo's Joomla offshoot seems to be more popular now, but I don't think they are very different. Sites made with Mambo tend to retain the default layout, so it may be difficult to customize, but pretty much all the php cms's that chop up the page into different files have this drawback. HOWEVER, it works, and there seem to be a lot of people coding widgets for it, so you will probably be able to install it and start working on the content, which is what you need to do, right? RIGHT?
Here is a list of the CMS's I installed and configured, and most of them I made skins or themes for, over the past three years of trying to get this one site going:
Rick,
Movable Type
Geeklog
Mambo
pMachine
Nucleus
Plone
DragonFly
Typo
TextPattern
Civic Space
Drupal
Postnuke
WordPress
e107
There were two times when I thought "Mambo is it, I'm going with Mambo" over those three years. If I had, I'd rpobably be ahead of where I am now, just getting out of the gate with e107 (I like the event calendar better, and the event cal is an important component of my site).
We're strongly considering Mambo in our departmental environment to handle our Intranet site, our time tracking, our projects and our version maintenance.
I'd go with Joomla over Mambo: it has more momentum behind it (including a lot of the original Mambo team) and is easier to customise, in my experience. There's a new version (1.5?) due out very soon.
I've also been using Expression Engine a lot recently and it's very good. $100.
I'd been looking at Mambo recently. Until I realised that all the cool kids had already moved onto Joomla so I followed suit. It's pretty handy for what I wanted which was maximum flexibility with the minimum of coding. For example DBQ looks like a really promising way of doing basic applications without any coding, just a bit of SQL.