Anyone ever used Mambo or know how to do things in it? I have a website I have been working on that has a forum, a blog and an entry page. Well the Server crashed the whole thing is gone now. This happened twice now I am kinda upset with the company., but my fault for not backing it up. I decided to do the new one in Mambo but guess what I don't understand it. I could really use some help. My future depends on it I am tired of working a 9 to 5. Anyone familiar with Cron jobs?

Here is the deal I need an entry page with some flash to it, I need to have a blog that I can set up so others can post to it also. I need a forum, a download area and an area that people can make their own little sites to post pictures and experiences.

I can't help you with that sorry :S

The best suggestion I can make is to look for similar things and view their source code to see if you can figure out how they made several things work,

I'm sorry to hear about your website being deleted.

I have been using Joomla! for the clan's site, and I find it spectacularly awesome. Joomla! is being developed by a part of the original team that was working on Mambo. So it's pretty much the same thing. The difference is that Joomla has a bigger tool repository. (http://www.siteground.com/joomla_mambo.htm)

If you want to try it out check this link out: http://demo.joomla.org/ .
Or if you want more control over Joomla there are free hosting sites that come with it preinstalled. (FreeHostia).

For what I see, everything you want can be worked out.
Splash page: Create an HTML page (index.html) with desired animation and linked to the site's index.php (which is the one used by Joomla).
Blog: There are extensions that for that, some are even based on WordPress.
Forum: Same as above; some are even based on phpBB3. There are also native forums for Joomla.
Download area: If you are the only one uploading these files it's just a matter of placing the links in the Downloads section.
Little sites for pictures and text: What can be used here is maybe a photo album that supports text? If that's not enough check http://extensions.joomla.org out. It has all the supported Joomla extensions.

Cron jobs are programmed tasks. Under Linux cron and crontab can be used (http://www.scrounge.org/linux/cron.html), under windows I guess that Scheduled Tasks can be used.

I'm also driving through Joomla's learning curve. If you need any help I'm more than available. At the moment I am playing around with Joomla and SQL. Shortly will start with Ruby on Rails (pretty neat too!).

PS. Nobody uses splash screens anymore