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xcGallery
2009/11/30 - 7040

XOOPS Developer Notes
2009/10/31 - 990

Checklists: Upgrading, Deploying or Moving a XOOPS Site to ...
2009/8/30 - 753

Article - XOOPS News/Blogs Module
2009/6/11 - 3062

Block Anywhere - XOOPS - Smarty Templates
2009/5/24 - 1232

XOOPS 2.3.x Overview, Installation, and Upgrade (from ...
2009/5/15 - 5083

WF-Channel Content Module
2009/5/7 - 2407

xoRewriteModule
2009/5/5 - 3327

Calendar - piCal
2009/4/30 - 3107

AltSys - Block/Template Management
2009/4/29 - 3280

SmartSection
2009/4/26 - 6059

FCKeditor
2009/2/3 - 34053

Article Management System (AMS) Module for XOOPS
2009/1/9 - 1293

News, Blogs, Articles Modules for XOOPS
2009/1/9 - 1811

Jobs & Resume Listings
2008/12/16 - 1404

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Overview

XOOPS (eXtensible Object-Oriented Portal System) IMHO is the best designed of the open-source, php-based, extensible, modular-based content management (or portal) web application frameworks found in the open-source community. The foundational structure of XOOPS, its focus on an object-oriented design, its support for a presentation layer separate from the functional layer -- using Smarty Templates (one of the best), its support of write-once and use everywhere philosophies, its lightweight focus, and its active community makes it a simple choice for professionals (even if it's created some specialized forks as most any of these have).

I tried out many others a few years back before jumping into the XOOPS game -- including the granddaddy of them all, phpNuke, as well as many of the other offshoots including postNuke, Xaraya, evolution, and others like Drupal, Joomla. I must admit that I'm intrigued by the oft-cited Joomla (a Mambo fork) used by one of my clients, as well as Drupal, but I'm still delving under the hood on understanding and implementing those frameworks with best practices and making them truly user-friendly. My preliminary review shows them to have good out-of-the-box experiences, but not nearly as easily extensible as XOOPS. And any CMS done properly requires extensive customization and effort, so it require significant time investment. Finally, the award-winning XOOPS did some positive reorganization in late 2007-early 2008 giving the community new forward progress and even bringing some of the forks back together as well as setting up an advisory board and more structured teams to lead the group into the future.

More: Wikipedia

Main XOOPS Links

• XOOPS
  • Home
    
  • Modules
    
  • Support: Wiki | FAQs | Forums
  • Dev: XOOPS Dev Forge | SourceForge: Core | Modules
• Building and Maintaining a XOOPS Site: 2.0.x Series | 2.3.x
  
• Module Sites
  • xForge (CBB, WordPress, Dokuwiki, xLanguage...)
  • Herve Thouzard (News, mydownload, shortcuts)
    
  • Smart Factory (SmartSection, SmartProfiles, SmartFAQ, and others)
    
  • XForge (CBB, WordPress, Dokuwiki, xLanguage...)
  • Panther Software Publishing (xProject, xAsset, etc.) - now dead :-(
• User Sites of Interest
  • : XoopsExperts
    

What XOOPS Does Well

• Caching - XOOPS excels at this and is lightweight on the server supporting large numbers of users, especially when on shared servers, and also when compared to commonly cited Drupal and Joomla which both use huge amounts of system resources. There is fine granularity of control on a per block basis, or you can set it at the module level.
• Presentation Layer - XOOPS uses Smarty Templates. Essentially the data is produced in the program, and then you present the data using the HTML templates using Smarty. There is some programming involved there, too, but they are much easier to implement (in general).
• Security and Programming Abstraction - the underlying technology for developing XOOPS modules, its object-oriented design, and such is very well designed and quite secure. If you follow the methodology and cleanse your variables, then you shouldn't have to worry.
  

What XOOPS Needs

• Workflow - The ability for users to have/need approvers for content. So a user's posts in any module either requires approval and/or generates notification for/to approvers. So many clients ask for this. We kludge it somehow or go without and trust more.
• Image Thumbnailing - a method to thumbnail images and call them from within content, especially the WYSIWYG editors (such as FCKeditor, my fave)
• URL Rewriting/SEO - The easy ability to rename modules so that paths make sense to people using the site and hides the /modules/ directory. A few modules do this, including SmartSection (content manager)
  
• In-Line Glossary - aka Tags - where words and phrases can be highlighted for in-line content to pop-up glossary information.
• Events and Conference/Session Registration/Management Module with payment mechanism through commerce and/or subscriptions (latter should work fine).
• Event History/Audit Log - for administration, able to turn on and off, archive, etc.
  
• Cron Management capability for modules - there is some cron capability in XOOPScare and Backups.
• Generic Display Processing Hooks - allows registered hooks into general text processing, for tagging, putting doc-image tags, highlight for search, image thumbnailing, etc. Maybe into Smarty, or maybe somewhere else, not sure, but Joomla has great automated thumbnailer

Things I Will Explore Further

• Boox (Blocks out of XOOPS - allows to include blocks in theme)