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Luciorota, read my full message and you'll see what I can and will do for XOOPS ;)

Hello all, in this (way too long) post I'm talking about my personal opinion about XOOPS and where we need to take the project. It's all my opinion ;).

XOOPS has been standing too long at a standstill.
It breaks my heart, but XOOPS hasn't really seen any progress in a long while. Everything seems to have come to a standstill, even though work is being done working on XOOPS.

It all looks however like nothing is happening: check the website and you barely see anything new. Exciting things are being worked on in the kitchen however:
* xBootstrap
* xThemes and the possibilities it adds
* XOOPS 2.6

However, even more things have grounded to a halt or have simply dropped dead. Examples of this are abundant:
* Module development is nearly dead. New modules have stopped coming for a long while, mostly small updates of a few modules occur. Old modules aren't really maintained.
* Theme development is also nearly dead. The last new theme by someone else than angelorocha and Bitcero dates from 30 August 2014 by Sinnedesign.
* A World of XOOPS hasn't been done since October 2013, more than a year ago. And in that release there is being spoken about XOOPS 2.6, but it still isn't out.
* A lot of developers have simply stopped working and moved on to other projects, including some of the biggest contributers I've known.

Generally, it looks like a ton of things are dead, which is truly a shame.

What are the causes of this?
In my opinion, the things that cause this are:
1) A really big lack of information and documentation.
A lot of things or documentation offered by XOOPS is either outdated or simply incorrect. Many of it's links are dead or point to wrong information. (Example:https://xoops.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=331).
The official XOOPS Documentation (https://xoops.org/modules/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) is chaotic and incomplete. It's not really welcoming for new users and just fulled with incomplete and incorrect info.
For developers, the amount of information is almost non-excistant, and it's all hosted on third-party sites. I have tried to get into module development, but I never found a starting point and reliable information/documentation to support me.
Should there be good documentation available, I would have continued, but right now I don't even know where to start.

2) The official site is a mess.
Yes, I said it. XOOPS.org is a mess.

XOOPS.org isn't following a clear visual style, which really is an issue in XOOPS itself. Check the Theme gallery, compare it to the Module repository. Both look completely different and feel different.
The Repository is bugged and doesn't show sub-categories on the frontpage, but simply says Array. Many downloads don't work at all and you get redirected to the XOOPS Sourceforge page. Some categories don't display anything at all.
Basicly, the module Repository is useless and doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

The theme gallery is huge, has a ton of themes that aren't from this age and really should be either updated or dropped. Examples of this? Just check the theme gallery. Themes are by default sorted by Date, and the newest ones are shown first, but no themes were added in the gallery after 2010. It's just not user-friendly and it doesn't work like it should in my opinion.
A nice example of what I think is a great theme gallery (though it isn't perfect at all) is the Ghost Marketplace (http://marketplace.ghost.org/). Simplicity is bliss.

Another big issue for me is the Forum, like it currently is. It's a mess, which should be changed/restructured in my opinion. An example is that we have support threads for 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6.
In my opinion these should be merged into 1 main Support category, with sub-forums for versions.
As far as I was able to Google, 2.3 was released in 2008, so I really think this should be archived so it doesn't pollute the main (most important) threads.
I'd like to see all of the "old" boards archived in a special category. It'll be much more clean and easier to use!

3) Isn't it time to move on and drop older versions?
On the XOOPS website, we support a lot of things. Many of these shouldn't be there anymore. For example, the theme gallery seperates between old and new themes. This was for version 2.0.14.
XOOPS 2.0.14 was released in 2006, nearly 10 years ago. Shouldn't we simply drop these themes, or put them on an archive? It doesn't make any sense at all to still offer these on our site after all these years. You've had time enough to upgrade ;). This will also clean the servers and maybe allow to save some money.
Same thing applies to the Module Repository, documentation and the forums. When it's too old, archive it or delete it. It just costs a lot of effort to keep and maintain these things.

Okay, that was about everything I could think about right now. Ofcourse, I wouldn't rant about things and not do anything myself.
Recently, I've decided to help with the development of XOOPS, so I'll try to help with that. My PHP isn't that excellent yet, so it might be slow.
I'm also willing to help with the documentation or even start working on it right away, to ensure that we can start XOOPS 2.6 with a really well backed documentation.
I would also like to help moderating the forums and help restructuring the site as needed.
Name any area that needs to be improved, and if I can change it and help, I will.

Right now, I'd like to ask you guys your opinion about what I just typed (thanks for reading this :P) and I'm awaiting the feedback you guys might have.

Our time is now, let us not waste it!

Kevin

This is a great editor which I can truly recommend (since I use it myself). If you like it a bit more lightweight, Sublime Text is the way to go.

I'd like to see that XOOPS 2.6 will be fully MVC, but I fear it'll take a longer while than that to see it actually happen (it will take a lot of work to get this in place).

It will be worth the effort though, as MVC has many benefits.

Rheas, reCAPTCHA can't be hacked. Once their current CAPTCHA is bypassed, they simply update their algorityhm. Because it is a service, they can do that. You don't install their system on your PC, you simply embed their service.

That's why reCAPTCHA's change over time: now they use black spots on their captcha's. They also warp captcha's over time.
So generally, reCAPTCHA is a good system, but like any system they can be bypassed, but reCAPTCHA does a really good job. But like any CAPTCHA, they haven't got a 100% succes rate.

Or you can use CSS conditional stylesheets which trigger at a specific screensize :)

We should make one module the official one and include it in the core. It's not an optional choice to install one, it's a required feature for any site to add content.

I suggest that we modify Mastop Publish a bit - it's a great module, but needs some polishing now (reducing size e.g.)

Just guessing, but isn't this code able to do this?



It's early, so it probably has a few mistakes in there, but what it does is declaring a new function which will look for the current page URL. It's then being checked by an if statement if it's true and loads a stylesheet depending on the result.

Maybe prefixing a post with [PAID] if it's a paid theme would be an easy solution, but only for the new ones.

I wouldn't use the same script because if it gets updated it could introduce some nasty bugs on your site if it's a big update.