Today we opened up a Topic of the Week (TOTW) forum over at Mambers.com. The forum will contain weekly hot topics of the Mambo community. We invite everyone to discuss this topics with detailed personal opinions with all community mambers. The TOTW forum will have a little harder forum rules, as we don't allow post's like "I agree with him" and every topic will be closed after a week. This should ensure a high quality of the discussions.

This weeks hot topic is Mambo and Search Engine Optimization. Please tell us what you think about the current integration into Mambo and the 3rd party addons. Is SEO really that hot or is nothing we should care about? Tell us your opinion over at:

• [week 48] Mambo and search engine optimization

Today a new Mambo website has been started. Over at MamboFAQ.com a new Mambo FAQ system will be build up. The aim of the website is to finally answer the questions we encounter over and over in the several forums for Mambo. MamboFAQ.com has several unique features like 25 different languages, PDF download, printer friendly pages, public rating and commenting.

Everybody can ask questions and also answer open question. To ensure high quality answers all of them will be reviewed. The system currently has an english and a german subsection. More will follow in the future, when more editors has entered the team. At the moment the MamboFAQ.com is recruiting, so everybody, who wants to join in, email the team over at their website. Everyone else, start posting questions over at:

• Ask your questions @ ww.mambofaq.com

We are proud to announce that our forum community Mambers.com now has more than 10,000 registered users who generated more than 65,000 Mambo related posts. Please allow me to use this news to present you the people, who do all the work behind Mambers.com:

• CoAdmin: descartes
• Supermoderators: rober, X-F4CT0R
• Dutch Team: Regenerate
• English Team: jascha, visualdensity, zorkhh
• French Team: eyezberg
• German Team: dot°NETt, gisu, lukewill, master, mrjinx, musicones, na!tsabes, pflegeonline, ralf, wolfi
• Italian Team: andreadesign, michelerocco, vamba
• Polish Team: Bolo
• Portoguese Team: fabio
• Spanish Team: funmaking
• Turkish Team: KoC

Many many thanks for your help in making Mambers.com what it is today. Register your account today:

• www.mambers.com

Rohollah Balvardi informed me about the opening of a new Farsi support website for Mambo. The website will take over the translation into the persian language and will try to support local developers and designers. You can find them here:

• www.mambofarsi.com

As you might have noticed, Mamboportal was offline for about 28 hours during the weekend. The reason for this was a targeted attack against our server on saturday morning.

I was on a trekking trip this weekend and sadly announced this at my homepage (www.konze.de). An hour after I left into the woods the attack was started and crashed the server. Although the server is monitored 24/7 the message didn't reach me as my mobile phone was off. Therefore I only could react on sunday afternoon, when I was back.

Sorry for the inconveniences you might have in reaching our network. And congratulations to the attacker! You got your news and also caused a lot image and monitary damage, due to not fullfilled banner contracts...

Today the first regional forums opened up at Mambers.com. The aim of these new forums is to bring Mambo users located in the same region together in real life. The forums will be populated and moderated by the so called MUG's (Mambo User Groups). The MUG's are local Mambo groups, which meet regulary in real life.

To support the growing number of MUG's, Mambers.com will open up more regional forums in the future. At the moment we started the first test drive with regional forums for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A banner campaign running over the whole network will also attract users to this new concept. You can find the forums here:

• Germany's regional forums
• Austria's regional forums
• Switzerland's regional forums

A new Mambo websites has been opened up today called Mamboparts.com. The website is made for developers and designers, who have no own Mambo website for demonstrations and support. Developers interested will get their own forums over there and also can present their CMT inside Mamboparts demo website. Currently MaMML and 404SEF are hosted their. You can find them here:

• www.mamboparts.com

Mamboportal.com is moving. We are migrating the whole website to Mambo 4.5.1 during this week. As Mamboportal is a more complex website, this may will take a while. Therefore we decided to set up this new website and then migrate everything step by step.

Our largest problem is the userdatabase, which contains more than 70,000 entries. After a first check, the database contains about 7,500 double entries (according to the emails). We decided not to migrate the old userdatabase, but start with a new and empty one. This helps us to remove the doubles and also the inactive users.

Every registered member will get an email in the next hours. Inside this email, we wil explain the situation and kindly ask everyone interested to register at the new website. This website can be found at:

• new.mamboportal.com

Our german sistersite Mamboport.de is searching for new members, who would like to join their team. Mamboport.de is one of the larger german news and file websites. They are also part of the Mambers.com alliance. If you are interested in joining in, please contact them throught their website:

• www.mamboport.de

Ron Hoefnagel, webmaster of Mambest, has started a new service for the Mambo commuity today. Mambolance will try to bring buyer's and freelancer's together. Buyer's, which are in need of custom solutions for their Mambo installation can place their request inside the system of Mambolance. Freelancer's, which have to register, can place offers to the buyer's request.

To avoid fake bids a small commission is charged. Also Ron decided to give back to the community and donate 5% of all income to the Mambo project. You can visit Mambolance here:

• www.mambolance.com

Rolf Walker, webmaster of our swiss sistersite Mamboportal.ch, announced his retreat from the Mambo community today. Besides his job Rolf currently has no time left, he could spend to his website. Therefore he is searching for a new swiss webmaster, who want's to take continue to maintain Mamboportal.ch. If you are interested to take a over his well visited website, please contact Rolf at:

• www.mamboportal.ch

The worlds number 1 Mambo template website Mambohut.com has released a new tutorial for Mambo 4.5.1 today. The tutorial titled 'Enhancing template details' tells you some nice tricks about the XML installer file for templates. You can find it on their website:

• Enhancing template details

Today my Thunderbird email client crashed after I removed a virus. After the restart sadly my complete inbox was empty and it seems impossible to restore the about 500 emails. Why are you telling this?

• Everybody who send in files for publishing and does not see his file online, please resend it to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
• Everybody, who knows a good, bugfree and secure email client, please give me some advice. Besides OE, I tried 'The Bat' and 'Thunderbird' already and I'm not fully satisfied. So, I'm open to any ideas...

Today we have started a new, large survey for the Mambo community. Instead of asking a single question after another, we decided to bring you a large survey. It is called 'The great Mambo community survey' and it contains 35 question from five different topics:

• General community demographics
• Community Internet usage
• Commercial Mambo development
• The Mambo community and Mamboportal.com
• The Mambo development and Mamboserver.com

The survey was made to make Mambo and every actives service to the community even better. The results of this poll will be published step by step after the poll is finished in two weeks. Please help us and fill ot the survey. It takes you only 5 minutes! You can find it here:

• poll.mamboportal.com

Andy Miller aka Rhuk has started a new Mambo website called Mambodev.com today. The website will offer commercial services and also will inform the community about Andy's GPL activities: "This is basically a site for my custom mambo development work plus news and information regarding my GPL templates." Andy, who is the author of the popular Planetfall and Solarflare templates, opened his website over at:

• www.mambodev.com

Our italian sistersite Mamboserver.it has moved to Mambo 4.5.1 yesterday. The new website uses a modified Solarflare template and runs the italian total conversion of Mambo 4.5.1, which is available from Mamboserver.it. You should take a look at their website here:

• www.mamboserver.it

• www.mambers.com

More than 500,000 users visited the template website Mambohut.com since their launch in January 2004. We congratulate Mambohut and hope to get the next 500k visitors soon.

According to our reasearch Mambohut.com ist the fifth largest Mambo website in the world and the number 1, when it comes to Mambo templates. Hundreds of templates can be explored and downloaded from their website:

• www.mambohut.com