Not to forget to add CAPTCHA authentication to ward off Spam comments from Bots.

Imagine this: User comes to a XOOPS powered Blog, reads a news article and tries to comment, but is put off by the need to register first. He goes away, never to return.

He has not been successfully engaged and encouraged to participate in the discussion. The need to register makes many to drop the whole idea of commentating.

Right now XOOPS gives three options:
1. Undergo the whole registration process irrespective of whether you plan to revisit or not.
2. Or post as 'anonymous/guest'.
3. Just go away.

Almost everybody chooses 3, a few go in for commenting as anonymous, but do not return.

Authors go to great extent to pagerank their sites and improve search engine visibility. They try to bring in more traffic, but if they cannot succeed in building interaction with their readers, these efforts will go waste and they will continously hunt for more readers as the old drift away. Retaining visitors is more important than finding new readers.

<b>Xoops has to change and evolve. </b>

Blogs are becoming a hallmark of web 2, empowering personal publishing, political dissent, punditry and so on.
Blogs like Instapundit, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs are succeeding in challenging the fate of elections and so on. This movement is now obvious to Xoops. Hardly 0.1 % of blogging is done on Xoops. Why not? XOOPS does have everything needed for Blogging, except for a few things like pingback and trackback (athough somebody did make a module for it, but it is stalled now, also the wordpress module)

ALL other software/platforms/tools like Blogger, Wordpress, My Journal, MovableType, SquareSpace, b2evolution, Blog:CMS, UBlog, .Text, BlogWare and Xaraya provide for easy guest commenting under their own name.

Unless XOOPS succeeds in positioning itself as a capable Blogging platform, a huge oppurtunity is lost. XOOPS has the core features, just has to implement a few more tweaks and thats it.

1. CAPTCHA authentication
2. Trackback/pingback
3. Pinging of Blog Indexes
4. Easier User Commenting system

Won't a quick check with the registered userbase return a message asking the poster to choose another name/nick?

The Rank can be shown as 'unregistered guest' or something like that. Also, an Icon to show that the user is UNAUTHENTICATED can also be used.

Today, the moving and fleeting population of visitors hopping from one blog to another make up upto 90% of a blog's visitorship. Hardly 10% can be retained as regular visitors who can be cajoled to register.

This is therefore Important IMHO.

I am posting a feature request at sourceforge as directed, Thank you!

I use XOOPS as a Blog with News Module as the main blogging module.

I have many visitors who do not wish to register just to post comments.

They instead post comments as 'anonymous user/guest'.

When many post as 'anonymous user/guest', the thread becomes flooded, confused and hotchpotch since the posters become unambigious.

Can we have a feature like the mainstream blogging tools have like:

Option to enter Name, Email and URL while posting comments without registering. And also the option to post anonymously can be preserved.

As soon as somebody reads a news article and presses the comments button, the form should have 'name, email and URL as well as the comments text area' along with an option to post anonymously. However, when the user fills in his name, email and url and writes his comments and posts it, he can be taken to a extended standard registration form.

This will solve many problems and even encourage visitors to register since registration will not involve a separate willful procedure to register. Instead, an action of posting comments can induce the visitor into registering.

Nowadays, nobody wants to undergo the process of registering unless the site is very important or has some resource they really want and cannot get without registering. For casual blogs, nobody will ever take the pain of registering just to post A SINGLE COMMENT.

Hope I made myself understood.

Regards,
Jagan aka Fireater.

As of today, NONE of the blogging tools like Zoundry, Blogjet, Qumana, Powerblog, etc work properly with Xoops.
Except perhaps w.bloggar- but the w.bloggar project is defunct and dead.

The reason being XOOPS API is out of date and badly needs upgrading.

Please upgrade implementation of blogger/metaweblog/wordpress/ compatible API's too

Thank you!

Fireater.

Similiar problem with me, it only shows three template sets, while I have around 5.

Also, the administration page which shows the template sets seems to be without a theme.. i.e plain without stylesheets.

PHP Debug mode gives the following error:


What could be the problem/solution anyone?

<B>EDITED</B> SOLVED: I just overwrote that main.php file with another and the problem got solved.

THanks!

Take a look at this discussion.. your answer is here..

http://www.testdriven.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=562&forum=5
Testdriven.com

ALSO, the DEVS need to see this.

The RSS feed of TESTDRIVEN.com website seems to offer many more choices over the standard backend.php..

life for example that site WHICH RUNS XOOPS offers both news and Links as a RSS feed, also mutiple feeds with different numbers of news articles.

Kindly incorporate this feature into the next release.

RSS is gaining popularity and soon many will be using RSS readers INSTEAD of browsers!!

Jagan Mohan R.

After no help from the XOOPS community, I had to investigate my issue myself...

After much asking, tweaking and stuff, I found out that my ISP had been the culprit all along and had modified htaccess files to deny access to the xmlrpc.php file as a security measure it seems.

The solution: just rename the file and everything seems to work OK.

phew!

I tried to use w.bloggar 4.0 to post news to XOOPS 2.2 and got a 406 Error Message.

I tried to open xmlrpc.php through IE browser and coudn't reach the file.. the error IE gave is as follows: Quote:
Opera gave the following error:
Quote:

This same error code, i.e.. 406 was displayed by w.bloggar.

What could be the reason?

Does anybody have any idea about what could be wrong and how it can be corrected?

And what is the use or function of this:
/class/xml/rpc/bloggerapi.php

Any replies would be most appreciated!!

Jaybird.

Whoa!!
Domineaux... I understand your troubles and sympathise with you.

BUT... I have some opinions.

RULE of Open Source No 1:- is to 'Release Early, Release Often'
(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html)

Only when the Devs release a product early in the development chain, most bugs would be wiped out well before the product matures when it would be more difficult to remove it.

Secondly, often releases enable all users to find the bugs and report them so that the devs can deal with them.

USER HAVE A DUTY. THIS DUTY IS TO INSTALL THE BETAS, TEST THEM AND REPORT THE BUGS.

Only if the Users fulfill this duty with as much enthusiasm as the devs have to develop the product, will the Product move from Beta to Live version.

So, one cannot just ask for quality without contributing to the effort.

If you find a product buggy, just post the bug here.

Join the efforts. We all stand to gain.

Thanks!

Dynamic User Fields is a Old Story on Feature Request

It has been asked for many times before as early as during the very first version of Xoops!

But, I believe the Dev Team has come around to include this feature in XOOPS 2.6.. Lets hope so
That would be a smash!!

Check this out!!:
https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3486&forum=10#forumpost14135