Just another Nodetraveller

I’ve moved my blog from Mambo to Wordpress. Mambo is a great CMS but as a blogging tool, its not quite so mature. I wanted something simple and web standards friendly and wordpress seems to be it. The casualties in this move are the comments and the uk tv guide. I’m no longer publishing the component as its a Mambo component. but head on over to SynTV for the listings. Fortunately I haven’t blogged too much over and I was able to transfer over by good old cut n paste.

I was a bit disappointed with the standard rss feature in Mambo as it only supports rss 0.91. Suprisingly, there wasn’t a component available that outputs the content in any of the other formats so I thought I’d give it a go. No point in reinventing the wheel so I made use of an excellent class called FeedCreator. It can output in RSS 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0 as well as OPML and ATOM 0.

I’ve just completed a component for Mambo. As you can probably guess by the name, it retreives and displays the TV and Radio listings for the UK. At the moment, there is a choice of over 60 channels and two ways of displaying the listings; columns and timeline. I spent a bit more time on the UI than normal but finally I’m pleased with it. It works using XML RPC, connecting to my service and then displaying the listings.

I’ve been using an opensource CMS application recently called Mambo. We needed some kind of CMS for our own site and after looking around, weren’t really happy with what was out there.. The sites based on *nuke seem so chaotic. But not Mambo. The sites created with Mambo are nicely designed and user friendly. But the admin interface is absolutely brilliant! Its a well designed system with a great community. Theres quite a few templates around which quite nice to look at.