I seem to have my IP banned from XOOPS.ORG. I'm only getting a blank page. If I specify a proxy server, I can at least reach the site. I'm logged in right now using lynx. I must have tripped Protector's settings or something, but now I can't participate in the forums. I restarted my browser. I can't use IE or Firefox unless I go through a proxy server. I'm on one of my servers logged in using lynx. Every browser on every computer in my house is unable to connect, so it must be the IP address. The IP address I'm using is 24.155.108.231 and the gateway is 24.155.109.254. My assumption is that it is one of those. Please, please please help. You can reach me via e-mail at mark.boyden@noise.org . Many thanks, --Mark

xcGallery, a port of the Coppermine gallery, is not dead. Latest release was in November 2006. I'm working on it some to make it less clunky as I'd agree with that. For one of my clients who was confused over the User/Admin mode, I just removed those links from the header, and that took care of that issue. I also kept the links in for the admins using the Smart Templates admin variable to make it easy to switch back and forth for site admins. However, once you've done this once in the beginning, you don't really care to do it anymore. And, it's just as easy to have two browsers running with different logins as most developers do. I tried a number of others including XoopsGallery (a "port" of Gallery, but not integrated with XOOPS very well yet - no user/permission integration), myAlbum, xsGallery, picito, and extgallery. Each has its strengths, but if you want both site-wide and user galleries, shared, contributive, or not, then xcGallery works very well, especially if you work extensively on the templates. Once I'm done with my update, I'll release it and announce here. My preference is to contribute to the project, but we'll see. I've contacted the developer.

Maybe there needs to be a total update starting with the new Coppermine code, although a new release is about to happen. Maybe XoopsGallery could learn from the xosCommerce integration, which was done VERY well.

Good luck!

Mark

Yes there is a port of Coppermine Gallery, it's called xcGallery, and works pretty well overall. There have been two developers that have worked on this since its original version. Current version is 2.0.3 (as of 2007-04-23, released 2006-11-09). It has great features including flexible permissioning, site-wide and user albums, as well as the ability to share user albums (or not) and the ability for users to contribute to site-wide albums (with approval or not).

It's a little clunky at times, so I'm actually polishing a version of it right now for a project I'm working on and will release the changes back to the developer should they want to use them (I've made contact, but not yet heard back from the developer). Unfortunately, there are some hard-codings still within the code, which I'm striving to take out, generally, and some layout stuff I'm addressing as well. I'm also making the code more modular overall.

I'm also intrigued by the work on XoopsGallery, a port of the very popular Gallery application. However, it's not integrated with the XOOPS users or permissioning system. Until it is, ala the xosCommerce module, then it's not very useful as that would require two separate logins.

You're on the right track. You should be able to take a content module that works like a news/articles function.You need one that allows setting permissions on each category by group. Set-up XOOPS user groups for each subscription you want to sell (doesn't matter how long). Articles and SmartSection both come to mind, but there may be others.

Then install and configure the subscriptions module.

Your users may purchase subscriptions using the Subscriptions module. When they purchase the subscription, they are added to the group associated with the permission, and only for the time allowed by the time-length they purchased.

The menu for the content module you used above should only show those categories (aka each newsletter) that they have access to based on the group permissions and you can make module access overall (and thus the menu shown) based upon the group permissions.

The subscriptions module gateways (like connecting to PayPal IPN) does cost you a little money, but it was VERY cheap and well worth it (No, I don't know the developer).

Good luck; should be easy enough.

I've been using XOOPS for a number of community projects and websites, and am ready to take it further for my own purposes. I've also built a couple of modules for clients (but can't release them publicly due to contracts) for websites I put together for them using XOOPS.

I'm now building an ASP capability to release to my hosting clients overall and want to use XOOPS due to its foundation and such. However, I'm running into a number of issues and then found this thread. I want XOOPS to do well because it's underlying structure has a number of overwhelming strengths including caching and overall ease of modifications.

Because of their popularity, I've also tried Joomla and Drupal recently for some other projects I'm working on. They both have great out-of-the-box (OOB) experiences because they are quite pretty and have a ready-to-go set of basic functionality (like XOOPS used to have). Further, Drupal has some interesting extensibility of their datasets and an very organic category system (but very confusing to many of my clients).

But, I think XOOPS is still the best overall.

XOOPS has many strengths:
* Excellent caching. Extremely configurable
* Lightweight server application (due to caching)
* Object-Oriented design (much easier to understand)
* Separation of presentation and functional layers
* Smarty Templates (nuf said)
* Strong Security (assuming modules are developed using XOOPS functions)
* Modules - many excellent, solid modules that provide solid functionality for many users

XOOPs however lacks a few things. I've contributed to the Module developer's guide, but we do have some stuff to tackle. I certainly want to help.

* Incomplete Documentation - user guides and such way out of date. No complete documentation on stuff
* Common Administration Interface - there are a number of modules that have begun to use a similar style for the administration area, but still need more commonality in this area including pop-up/context-sensitive help
* URL Rewriting/SEO - The easy ability to rename modules so that paths make sense to people using the site and hides the /modules/ directory.
* Directory renaming - Easy way to rename modules so that the directories make sense to people reading them.
* Custom Profiles (although SmartProfile begins to fill this void for PHP5 and over users, I've just finished porting to PHP4 and moving to profiles directory ala 2.2.x)
* Workflow - The ability for users to have/need approvers for content. So a user's posts in any module either requires approval and/or generates notification for/to approvers. So many clients ask for this. We kludge it somehow or go without and trust more.
* In-Line Glossary - where words and phrases can be highlighted for in-line content to pop-up glossary information (ala tokens in Drupal).
* Event History/Audit Log
* Cron Management - capability for modules to have cron jobs that are hooked into the system (for those that have ability to add a cron job)
* Easy ability to integrate other best-in-class PHP- and OO-based applications into XOOPS (ala xosCommerce).
* Aliases - yes, it's easy to do this manually in .htaccess file, but let's provide an even easier web interface for users to manage these.
* Old modules
* Fragmented community - the XOOPS community has become somewhat fragmented. While I'm not a high participant, I do keep an eye on things here. We need to come back together and make sure we're implementing the best-in-class modules.

Modules
* Events and Conference/Session Registration/Management Module with payment mechanism through osCommerce and/or Subscriptions (latter may work fine for most needs).
* Handbooks - easy ability to manage structured handbooks (for manuals, employee handbooks, etc.)

I won't go further on modules at this point, because I still have more research to do on some of these.

The biggest thing that we can do to make XOOPS an excellent reality is to provide an excellent OOB experience for the new user. This includes an easy installation (which XOOPS has), an excellent first template for "curbside appeal" ala looking for a house (lacking), a comprehensive set of modules that are easy to use and work similarly with well-executed templates. I know XOOPS moved away from a core set of modules, but this can be a strength. Coupled with a beautiful theme, it's the main reason Drupal and Joomla are so popular despite the fact they aren't as configurable, easy to modify, and have a major CPU impact compared to XOOPS.

I'm willing to help and looking to engage more.

I'm also having problems with the player for MP3 files. I get a message in firefox (pop-up dialog box) that says an illegal instruction was performed and that I need to restart firefox. The player doesn't fully load anymore.

I'm running XOOPS 2.0.16 and using PHP5/MySQL 4.1. I'm not getting errors when I turn on debugging, either.

I'm going to have to do something about it, but don't know what yet. I'd love to help debug this and fix it since it's the best one on the scene at the moment.

Mark

Overall a great module, and the best so far I've seen on XOOPS.

Like others, I'd love to see some enhancements to this module. For instance:

* Different templates for different categories (so you can have music layout on one, video layout on another, etc.)
* The ability to have multiple file types for each piece. Thus, as a band, they can offer more than one version of the file. Same for video (although who would bother doing anything besides Flash video or audio anymore).
* Having files in another configurable location, like uploads or even xoops_trusted_path so someone could potentially sell access to them (although may be better served using another module and in-line block).
* Ability to attach images to categories and sub-categories (think for bands, etc).
* xoopseditor framework for the AddInfo textarea (I like fckeditor the best of what is published, but everyone can and should take advantage of this framework, and modules need to be modified, usually only a couple of lines needed)
* links local or external (local allows you to run more than one site linked to the same database).
* Allow editor/moderators (without Admin access)
* Category, File sorting, comments should be a per category setting
* Permissions
. * Upload permissions should be in the permissions tab
. * Permissions per category for approvals (single/batch)
* Files per page should be a category attribute
* Block that is an in-line player ala MySpace with admin/moderator configurable options.
* Moderator edit capability of listings and categories outside the admin area.
* Playlists
. * ability to make and manage multiple playlists of their own (music and/or video combined)
. * Block for user that allows them to choose/play their own playlist
. * Ability to share playlists with others and e-mail to others (more than one).
* Blocks - several ideas here similar to what's posted above
* Ability to link to a YouTube/GoogleVideo or something like that.

I'm not asking for much, am I?

I, too, am having upload problems with debaser. Great module, overall, btw.

First, the upload on this module works a little funny with the pop ups (and like many savvy users I tend to use a pop-up blocker). This module was working just fine for one of my sites until recently. The only real change is that we upgraded the server to PHP5.2 (MySQL is still on 4.1 but planned for upgrade, too). It still uploads fine for small files (less than 5 meg), but on larger files (10M or so), I get a file-save dialog box trying to save a file named 'upload.php'. Somehow Apache is not delivering the right filetype back to the browser (maybe it times out or something now). The file isn't written to the uploads directory (and I'm not sure where the temporary file is saved yet).

Does anyone have any ideas? This module works better than SmartMedia.

I started a topic on Brandycoke's website about this. There was a reply that I tried, but it didn't work for me. You might try this thread and see if we can figure this out together. Does it work for other people? If so, what is different. It sounds like you are using v1.5 for XOOPS 2.2.x where I'm using v1.26 for XOOPS 2.0.x fork. Same results, though.

Mark

realize, too, that there is a newer version posted at the owner's website. 0.84b as of latest writing.