There was a dispute among the developers of Mambo some time ago. I don't recall what the dispute was about but quite a few of the developers left the Mambo project and started the Joomla project. Basically, since Mambo was open source, they simply took the latest version of Mambo, updated it, and renamed it Joomla.
So the first release of Joomla was was very similar to the Mambo release around the same time. Many of the extensions for Mambo continue to work with Joomla prior to Joomla 1.5. Best of all, I have yet to find a Mambo template that was compatible with Joomla. I imagine that Joomla has about as many extensions made for it as Mambo has but they are a lot easier to find. In fact, the entire Joomla website is easier to navigate. I remember I used to search for extensions for Mambo and it would take days to find what I wanted since the repository was so poorly organized. Then there were dozens of websites that had other extensions listed that weren't in the Mambo repository.
As far as I know, the current JoomlaHacks SMF-Joomla bridge will work for the current version of SMF. I have actually tested this bridge and found that it is much better than the official bridge. But I decided a long time ago, that I would not use a bridged forum with Joomla. There is always some little issue or limitation that pops up when you use bridges. For example, since the 2 programs have their own user system, keeping things in sync can be an issue. What I really disliked most was when a user logged out of one, he may not get logged out of the other or even more irritating, when a user logged into Joomla, he wasn't logged onto SMF as well. If the bridge can't handle cross system log in/out, then what is the point of bridging them.
I ended up using JoomlaBoard as an integrated forum component with Community Builder for added user features. Later I upgraded to FireBoard (Next generation of JoomlaBoard) and have found that while the forum component is not as powerful as SMF of phpBB, it does handle the job well and additions to Joomla can provide the webmaster and user with nearly all of the features you would get from SMF. As for forum systems, I must say that SMF is by far the best free one available. But trying to integrate SMF with Joomla or Mambo for that matter will ever give you kind of seamless transition from system to the other that you really should strive for when developing a website.
I suggest installing Joomla with FireBoard and Community Builder to see how it works. I think by this time next year, the FireBoard component will be a very strong forum system but currently it is still a very young project.
I don't know of any sites that discuss a comparison between Joomla and Mambo.
vujsa
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so I don't know how to deal with it.
and it has way too many cool add-ons that I really need.