There are 2 issues here, and it is important not to confuse them.
1) the first page a user sees when they log in (e.g. My Yahoo)
2) A "Home Page" for the user to present themselves (e.g. Yahoo Profile).

Myself, I'm much more interested in case 2 - the user has an area on the community site that they can use to promote themselves and their activities within the community.

Option 1 was something I had not considered. I would love for it to be possible that a user chooses only what news items, article categories, and even what modules they see according to their preferences, but this is not so important for me and I guess a long way down the line.

Option 2 I think is the more important, option 2 could therefore be used for option 1 as the user wanted.

Also, using the Yahoo paradigm above, the next logical extension is "Yahoo groups". Whereby on a large enough website people could form separate sub communities (e.g. Cats on a pets site, RPG on a games site, etc) and creating a group would then allow access to a separate discussion forum, photo gallery, etc.

Before anyone has a heart attack I know this is a *massive* amount of work (and I'm not suggesting it, merely discussing it), and as I mentioned before would have to have a lot more close configuration between modules - maybe to the extent that they became core (or a core API for each module type was defined) but I've evaluated almost all of the major OpenSource CMS/Portal systems out there, and while most of them are great at presenting heirarchical data in different, I don't think anything has the ability to build communities of this type. I guess I've really undervalued all the tools that Yahoo provides.

I'll bump this as I'm after doing something very similar.

Ideally Full Name, Member ID, and verfication number (post code/zip code, phone number) are stored in a (CSV?) file on the server, which gets parsed.

I can write the parser in about a dozen lines of Perl, no issues, but how/where would the php call this for verification?

Thanks,
Gareth

David,

Ideally yes. I guess it would involve a lot closer integration between the modules than currently exists.

However, I can't find anything else on MyPage (though I am investigating MyHome from the Repository). Can you point me at some more information please?

Thanks,
Gareth

A good place to butt in...

I'm very interested a module to give Users their own pages within XOOPS. For me, This would ideally contain:

User and profile information visible only to selected groups.

General free text area for user to put in details about themselves

Upload photos - Linked to Image Gallery (e.g. XOOPSGallery, Coppermine) to give a list of the persons phot contributions

Links to News Items and Articles that the user has contributed. Links so that User can easily create an article for his home page (e.g. my house, my cat, my whatever...) that is then also deposited into the articles section.

Area for user to add their web links

Integration into ImageManager / Text editor so that user can simply insert links to their details/images/articles into whatever they are submitting at that moment.

This could then - for me - be neatly wrapped up by combining the extended profiles with links to other installed modules on the site. This could make coding of it a lot easier?

Just my 2p, hope it is of use,

Gareth

Thanks, I'll give this a try.

That's a real nice site you've sent the link to - real professional looking.

Surely a custom group will restrict those who can see the items to the members of that group? This is not needed - everybody should be able to see these items, but they should be organised under one the categories to allow them to be found easier?

-bump-

No-one? Guess this really isn't possible then.

Having just posted a comment about using another CMS in a different thread, I have been wondering if I can use XOOPS for this after all.

This site will be for a national club made up of regional clubs. There will be two main sections - News and Articles. News is easier so I will go through that first.

I will need the following categories

National News
National Club News
Show News
NE Club News
SE Club News
S Club News
W Club News
etc..


On the front page I will want to display the news component shwoing all of these categories. However, I need to set up a page for each club which will also contain a news component showing ONLY the news from that club. I believe this may be possible by cloning the News block, but am unsure what steps I would need to take to do this.

The articles section runs along the same lines as news but with more categories - shows, events, visits, set-ups, etc with the home page to show the latest articles, and each clubs page only to show the articles from their own club, but in all of the different categories.

I do not want to go as far as installing multiple sites for this.

Any suggestions on how to create a separate page for each club (ideally running from a separate menu) would also be gratefully recieved.

I would be grateful for anyone's comments on how this may be possible using the core system, or alternatively suggestions for other modules that may be able to be used in this fashion.

Many thanks,
Gareth

David, All,

Believe it or not, my thread was meant to be supportive, but I guess it did not come across that way. I though the official recomendation was still to use the 2.0 branch for all production work ? This does in effect leave 2.2 a withered arm, even if it does have an upgrade path.

I have aldo downloaded 2.3 RC1, but it fails to even install on my system (WAMP), though I do not have a live linux system I can install this on and the folder structure seems radically different.

I know 2.4 is due and am waiting for that to upgrade existing sites. It won't answer all my needs but then nothing does.

Thanks again to all the Dev teams for their efforts.

Gareth

A general point on the end here - I have also looked at dozens of CMS for my new project and have eventually chosen Joomla. Why ? Theming seems a little more flexible and the onbaord WYSIWYG editors are nice, and the end user need polish, which this gives in abundance.

However, there is a lot missing. There is no decent forum module for Joomla. If you look at their website, they use an external forum component, which is not searched form the home page. How good an advert is that? Documenation is next to non-existent, and despite their massive forums, very few people contribute as much or as well as they do on the forums here. There is NO Access Control in Joomla, it's yes or no. And learning to do the basics took a hell of a long time.

I also had a long look at MaxDev, and got nowhere fast, despite them having a very freindly community over there.

So in answer to the question above, XOOPS is falling seriously behind in a lot of areas, and a lot of effort needs to be spent to get it up to speed. At the same time, it's also head and shoulders above the field in other areas, leaving other systems seriously struggling to catch up. The phrase that springs to mind is "horses for courses" - the XOOPS developers have a particular mind-set and ethos that gets particular priorities done first. You can have all the modules you want plugged into a system, but unless they work well with the core, you're just building biiger problems for yourself later.

Like many here, I am frustrated in the dead end that was the 2.2 tree and there has been no real core progress for what seems like a long time. But I work in algorithm development and know that sometimes you have to try things until they don't work, then start again. The things I need are on the list, and I know they will arrive eventually.

In short, I'm not a module Dev (PHP is on my long list of things to learn), so for the moment I will leave that to the experts. XOOPS isn't the best system out there because there isn't a best system out there - but it's a d*mn good place to start from and it's always the first thing I evaluate for any new project and will be for quite some time.

Keep up the good work guys (just a little bit faster, OK ?)