Ive been using Xoops on and off for about a dozen years. I used it in the past for a number of projects, both personal and for clients. I ran a 500+ member hiking group (before meetup.com existed) that had an event schedule, photo gallery and forum - worked beautifully well. Before Sharepoint came into its own, I've set up a half dozen intranet sites for clients to do basic project management and scheduling, forum, etc.

After a six year hiatus, I wanted to check it out again for a small side-job that I was working on and I am sorely disappointed. From what I am seeing so far, there are some face lifts to the themes and the installer is a bit more friendly (although still lacking) but functionally, xoops devolved!

Attempting to do what used to be a rather simple thing - set up a photo album that requires user logon to view.

I've used MyAlbum-p module for this exact thing about 8 years ago. Now, it's useless. Can't lock it down. Removing the sidebar shortcut for autonomous users simply hides the URL, but those are simple enough to guess and search engines will troll them within days of publishing. I could probably fix that, but the module itself is jacked! The album page with thumbnails looks like crap - way too busy and there is no intuitive way to see the actual full-size image! When clicking the thumb, the page goes to full-screen comment window (very 1999). In a few minutes of clicking, I could not figure out how to get it to show me the actual image. One would think that a photo album module would be at least good at showing photos, but no...

I downloaded two more modules. ExtGallery, which supposedly is 2.5-compatible, was a joke! You cannot upload images until you create a Category and then an Album. Zero instructions on how to do either one, but the category was simple enough. Then I spent 40 minutes clicking around the unfamiliar interface. If my life depended on it, I could not find how to make an f'n Album. Suspect the button is missing - great programming guys!

Third module was not any better. The whole evening wasted on amateur code that obviously nobody wants to work on anymore. I know, I got what I paid for. But it's a pity because it was simple, open and functional; no longer.

Tyson, it's really hard to respond to your comments.

On one hand, you're right, some of the modules needs improvement, and I don't think, anybody will argue about it with you.

On the other hand, XOOPS is Open Source, and is as good as the contribution. You've been gone for 6 years, have not contributed at all, and now are upset that in some areas things are not as good as projects where tons of people have contributed to over the last six years. But even there, despite all these contributors some of the big projects have issues and even have been hacked, as recently was the case in Drupal and in Wordpress. So the grass is not always greener on the other side.

When you leave and you come back to a project, and it doesn't meet your expectations because the progress was maybe not as fast as you wanted, there are always two choices:

a) you can tell us "hey guys, you suck", or

b) you can ask: "hey guys, where can I help?"

And there are so many ways to contribute to Open Source. Friendly users make friendly developers, who are then willing to go the extra mile to help them.

If we are not nice to each other, then we might create disappointment, or even anger , and this is not needed!

Please remember that the developers are people too! They have families, jobs, rent to pay, and that want to have fun too! So if instead of going to a movie, they spend their time trying to creating something for the community, let's show just a little appreciation by at least saying what exactly didn't work, so we can try to fix it, or enter as a feature request for a future release.

You spent one evening and things didn't work the way you wanted, so now you want to off-load your frustration and dump it on this board. Is it fair? Would it be easier and more fair to come and ask question, describing the problem and what you have already done to fix it?

It's easy to jump to conclusions about a project, after spending few hours with an older module, and without doing any research to see the work that is going on the next XOOPS version 2.6.0? Have you seen the presentations about upcoming features?

Have you seen the video showing the new module QuickPages from Eduardo (aka BitCero) that is based on his library RMCommon? We'll be working with Eduardo to integrate RMCommon into XOOPS 2.6.0, so all future modules will be as easy to use as his QuickPages, while taking advantage of all the new Core features coming in XOOPS 2.6.0 and beyond.


All of us wish that things would move faster and that we would be already where we want to be, but some journeys take longer...

If you like XOOPS ask yourself not what XOOPS can do for you, but what you can do for XOOPS! I hope, you will join us in this journey, as there are so many ways for you to contribute to XOOPS and help us

While it is true that the 2.5 is lacking at this time there is development being done to majorly upgrade xoops with 2.6. It is a major rewrite and is mostly done by one person with others helping as they can. If you load up the current version of 2.6 from github you can see the new direction we are headed in. Since it is an early alpha much of it is still under development. The installer and the themes have not been updated much for 2.6 but pretty much every line of the core is being touched in one way or another.

The best I can suggest is if you can help that would be great. If not, just keep coming back and check on 2.6 and see where we are at.

Rodney