Frameworks provides a collective of common functions, classes, and service packages required for or can be used by modules. You'll want to install this as a normal part of your XOOPS installation routine.

Frameworks was introduced during the 2.0.x and 2.2.x branch lifetimes as a way for programmers to provide a shared library of common useful code for use in modules. Upon the announcement of 2.3.x merge and looking forward to XOOPS 3, the Frameworks remains that, but has become standardized structurally, and some of the functions were moved to the core of XOOPS class directories (such as captcha), as will be a continual upgrading plan for xoops. However, since some older modules still use the old Frameworks, you have to have some of it installed for those to work.

Latest Versions: 1.22 | 1.35 | Frameworks for 2.3.0

Notes:

• 1.35 is based upon the Frameworks 1.20 release, but little changed other than the additions of
  

Summary

Frameworks combines several useful PHP open-source functions to make them available to developers to be used in modules. The following has been included in the Frameworks package (I'm still looking for documentation on this stuff):

• art -
  
• captcha - Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart; the anti-bot form-submission verification using a graphical number generation system to try and ensure a human being is at the helm (note: this version doesn't accommodate people of visual disability)
• fpdf - provides a PHP class allowing generation of PDF files without using the PDFlib library
  
• PEAR - PHP Extension and Application Repository; provides some XOOPS PEAR extensions
  
• textsanitizer - (1.22 , 1.35 adds geshi)
  
• transfer - allows access/transfer of information from one module to another and similar intercommunication
  
• compat -
  
• xoops22 -compatibility for XOOPS 2.2.x branch, so not needed in 2.3.x+
  

Installation

Install has become more complicated due to all the changes in XOOPS and what's used in Frameworks and the modules that use Frameworks. However, here's the basic simple method (for 2.3.x):

• Backup existing Frameworks directory
• Install Frameworks 1.22
• Install Frameworks for XOOPS 2.3.0
• Restore Frameworks directory from XOOPS 2.3.1
• Install new stuff from Frameworks 1.35 (./graphs, ./textsanitizer/geshi)
• Remove ./xoops22 directory

Some of the packages have MD5 verification code as described in their readmes. If you want to verify them, you will have to do each of them individually prior to installing per above. There is also information in that same file regarding configurations, language files and such. I looked around, but haven't seen anything to configure for my needs yet. Also, since Frameworks 1.35 started on a build of Frameworks 1.20, a few of the bug fixes from 1.22 got lost in 1.35, so use the order I specified.