Mambo vs Typo3
Mambo can be particularly useful if you don't want to do
customization, but simply add a lot of pages to your site.
Mambo is definitely the way to go if you are comparing it with
Typo3. We found Typo3 to be server resource intensive. Typo3 is
also a bit complicated and not suitable for complete beginners
of content management systems.
Both Mambo as well as Typo3 seem to have a lot features at first
glance. They also look good. If you just change the logo, you
immediately have a drag and drop site ready to go. Mambo can be
particularly useful if you don't want to do customization, but
simply add a lot of pages to your site and take advantage of all
the built-in tools Mambo provides.
Customization in Mambo is difficult. We thought that we could
complement the great design of Mambo by doing a lot of
customization. However, we found that the user-end documentation
was alright, but documentation for customization and
modifications were not adequate. Looked like many sections of
the manual are still under development as of this writing. We
wanted to create custom top menus for a client site, but there
weren't enough documentation and the time investment was not
worth it to understand the programming.
In terms of content management systems, we would also recommend
Drupal. Drupal installation and customization is easy and
without hassle. Also, documentation is adequate both in terms of
user and development requirements. We created a web site using
Drupal and it was easy to customize the top-menus, which we had
earlier wanted to do in Mambo.
To see how complex sites you can build with Drupal check out:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com. It was created using Drupal.