Mambo (currently in process of being rebranded as "Joomla") is a PHP/MySQL-based Content Management System that has been growing in popularity over the last few years, and has caught the eyes of several Alliance ministries.

However, Mambo does not work "out-of-the-box" on the Gospelcom.net hosting environment, due to its dependence on standard PHP sessions for authentication and tracking. The good news is that there is a valid "fix" that will allow Mambo to work on the Gospelcom.net servers.

In order to use Mambo in the Gospelcom.net hosting environment, you will need to do three things to make it work:

  1. Download a copy of this file: sessions.inc.php : and modify it properly
  2. Create a database table, as specified in this file : sessions_table.sql
  3. Modify 3 Mambo files

First step: Download a copy of the sessions.inc.php file, and open it in a text editor (such as Notepad). At the top of the file, you will find four variables that look like this:

$SESS_DBHOST = "SETME"; /* database server hostname */
$SESS_DBNAME = "SETME"; /* database name */
$SESS_DBUSER = "SETME"; /* database username */
$SESS_DBPASS = "SETME"; /* database password */

You will need to change each SETME entry to the appropriate value. For instance, the DBHOST variable would be:

$SESS_DBHOST = "mysql.gospelcom.net";

You will need to save it with the filename "sessions.inc.php" once you have made those changes, and then you will want to upload a copy of this file to your website (we suggest the Mambo "/Administrator" directory), to a place where Mambo can access it.

Secondly, you will need to create a new database table named "sessions" - you should be able to do this by either manually creating the table using phpMyAdmin, or by running the following SQL code in phpMyAdmin:

CREATE TABLE sessions (
sesskey varchar(32) NOT NULL,
expiry int(11) unsigned DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL,
value text NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (sesskey)
);

And one last thing - you need to edit the following three files in the Mambo "/Administrator" directory:

* index.php
* index2.php
* index3.php

In each of these files, you will find the following lines:

session_name("mosadmin");
session_start();

You will want to add the following line just before those two:

include($_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]."/Administrator/sessions.inc.php");

NOTE* that the path above ("/Administrator/sessions.inc.php") may need to change, depending on where you upload and store the 'sessions.inc.php' file that you dealt with in step 1.

And you''re done! You should now be able to use Mambo normally.