I'm looking at developing an online education community based on music. So far, of the content management systems that I have installed, Xoops, Xaraya and Mambo have been my favorites.

Xoops seems to have a very readable code base which from a development standpoint is very desireable. However, I havn't found a great deal of XOOPS themes that break the "mold". Most of the themes that I have seen are a variation of the standard theme used on this site.

IMO Xaraya and Mambo have the edge in the looks department...But from a development standpoint are there any major fundamental differences between these CMS'?

Any users expierienced in developing using any of these CMS'?

There are quite a few fundamental differences between XOOPS and Mambo (I don't know Xaraya well enough to comment). Far too many differences to list out here, each with their positives and negatives. It really comes down to what your needs are.

As for themes, if you are looking for free themes than yes, they are all variations of the same monster. That's not to say you can't do more though yourself, or hire someone to.

A few of my sites for instance are not similar (I think) to others.

http://www.gaining-mass.com
http://www.mmaglobal.com
http://www.fantasyasylum.com

these are a few that "break" the mold a bit, although they are all still "magazine" style layouts.

Development - XOOPS beats all. XOOPS is the cleanest in terms of codes (my biased opinion, of course) and it is very easily to extend. It is not difficult to develop your own custom modules.

"looks department" - XOOPS uses CSS, your creativity and imagination is the the limit.

Thanks for your input. I agree, the mold can be broken. Would any of the fundamental differences in the Content Management Systems affect the site's scalability?

Xoops is getting better day by day My CMS search was stopped when I understood its OOPs design and concept. I don't understand why everyone doesn’t use it. Perhaps reason it the same, why everyone doesn’t drives Honda

I see following improvements for XOOPS when template designing comes into picture.

Right colum is hidden when there are no block in it, but what is wrong with Left column? Why don’t we hide it too when there is no block in it ? I did a small hack for it – see http://thej2ee.com in action.

Template is not having any info about what module it is showing. Say I want to highlight the current active module’s menu item in the main menu ?? There should be a smarty variable for it. I have hack for this too - but not used anywhere yet.

There are other things which is expected from template designer not XOOPS dev team. Mambo has 2 user specific regions – user1 / user2 other than the normal top/left/center/right/footer regions. Mambo designers could show more creativity perhaps because of this flexibility. But here in XOOPS too, we have center-left and center-right which can be easily placed anywhere on the page. Till now, I have not seen any template designer using this… We gotta to go out-of-box in order to compete with others.

Long live Xoops.

I have written a report with a more in-depth comparison of XOOPS, Xaraya, Mambo and Drupal - The first half is the comparison, don't mind the second half, it was a Uni project and I doubt that it will have a big interest for you to know how I pictured a hook system for XOOPS

That was an excellent piece of work I have taken print-out to read fully during my commute. You guys are doing really great. I wish I also had time and opportunity to be part of team