Mambo vs Plone (Animal Kingdom Website)

[MamboBear]

I have one general question and several more detailed questions.

First, which would be the best choice for a website with pages for various animal orders, families, genera and species - Mambo, Plone or something else?

I mention Plone only because it's used by a website I'm using as a guide, the Animal Diversity Web. They use a modified version of Plone they call Mousetrap, as discussed at http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.ed...ogy/index.html

Here's a diagram of their system:

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.ed...ogy/index.html

I'm not sure if they chose Plone because of some particular advantage or if Mambo simply wasn't around when they first launched their website.

Another website I may emulate is the Tree of Life, at http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html

They use a recursive array technique called Edge
Representation, which is discussed about halfway down
this page: http://www.phyloinformatics.org/pdf/7.pdf

I should mention that I'm a beginner-intermediate at MySQL databases and PHP. I've used tables with a child-parent relationship but haven't learned how to make a recursive array yet.

* * * * * * * * * *

So, I'm primarily looking for guidance in choosing a platform - Mambo, Plone or something else. I also have some miscellaneous questions I'd like to toss out, just to help me understand this stuff better.

XMLFirst, is it true that XML makes a better database than MySQL? If so, can I use XML with Mambo? I worked through my first XML tutorial just yesterday, so it's very new to me, but it looks reasonably easy to understand.

I'm thinking of creating a website (let's call it MySite.com) based loosely on the Animal Diversitiy Web (including a MySQL database). Then, if I can get it to work, I can make a copy of this site (MySite2.com) and replace the MySQL database with XML pages - which, if I understand correctly, are included in regular web pages similar to how you can use PHP includes. Does this make sense?

Second, I want "bread crumbs" type navigation links to display at the top of each page, but I want a URL scheme like this:

www.geozoo.org/stacks/carnivora
www.geozoo.org/stacks/canidae
www.geozoo.org/stacks/canis_lupus

In other words, the URL's would be identical except that the last segment would be the name of a class, order, family, genus species. The three pages above discuss the wolf (Canis lupus), the family it belongs to (Canidae) and its order (Carnivora).

Here's where I get a little confused: I don't want to have to sit down and manually create 14,000 pages for every species of mammal and bird. Am I correct in understanding that a CMS can create pages automatically? If so, can you help me understand that?

For example, suppose I publish a website that consists of nothing more than a home page (www.geozoo.org/index.php), www.geozoo.org/stacks/ and any other files needed to operate the CMS. Let's say there are 25 pages in all.

Now, suppose I added just ONE species to my database - the wolf (Canis lupus). Would a page named www.geozoo.org/stacks/canis_lupus/ be automatically created as soon as I put that information in the database? Or would the page be created when a vistor typed "Canis lupus" into my search engine?

In either case, after a visitor finishes reading about Canis lupus, would that page remain online, where search engines can index it?

Thanks.