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I am playing around with XOOPS as a potential CMS for a project I am working on. The project is a redesign for an already existing website. There are hundreds of pages of content that will need to be migrated from the old site to the new. There are multiple sectors if you will of content. When I am done each sector will be maintained by a small team of people (1-2) who have a specialty in that area. Right now, I am not concerned with the form or style of the content being migrated as I expect that to change with the redesign. However I am concerned with how XOOPS will organize and store all of it.
My initial mockup which was coded by hand before XOOPS became a possibility for this redesign consists of a three column layout with main navigation and search features in the left column; copy/content in the middle; and then sub navigation on the right side. I have been trying to replicate this design with Xoops. So for example a navigation item on the left column might be “Computers” and if it were clicked the middle column would change to something of an index page for the “Computers” section and the right column would now have a second navigation menu dealing just with the content of this section.
I am at something of a loss right now as to what modules I could use to put this all together. I am playing around with Xpress to incorporate blogging into the website. But had been trying tinyd (hacked tiny content) for migrating the bulk of what is already there to the new XOOPS design. I am also experimenting with multimenu as a hopeful substitute for the rather poor default navigation scheme. What’s gotten me nervous about this is the 8 menu limit in multimenu as well as the poor organization offered by the whole system.
From what I can tell once my content is migrated into XOOPS there is going to be no good way to get it out. Someone working on the “Computers” subsection will have to remember that Computers is something esoteric like Tinyd03. Furthermore if I ever want to extract my raw data from this system I’m going to have to dig through all the different subfolders of my modules folder to find it. Sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen. I am not storing the raw data in the database as binary right now.
SO long story short – What Modules should I be using to pull this all together? I have seen XOOPS powered sites before that didn’t have retarded navigation like you get by using the default bar how did they do it? Can XOOPS handle a large volume of content?
OS: XP
PHP: 5.1.1
MySQL: 4.1
xoops: [RECOMMENDED] XOOPS 2.0.13.2
