I have tried most of the major distributions in the last 8 years but I always come back to debian for servers. My major reason for this is that any distribution where the vendor wants to make money from sales will always need to be upgraded by reinstalling their 'new version'. This is normally a nightmare and the best way is normally for format the drive and install the new version. With debian you are constantly upgrading everytime you do apt-get dist-upgrade! Ok, so the install for Fedora might look nicer and it might be better for a desktop but once debian is installed you probably won't need to reinstall for years.

They have a new installer which is easier to use:http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

Checkhttp://distrowatch.com/ Debian is number 5 on the list but the top 4 are desktop driven distros. I haven't used FreeBSD for years. It is probably slightly more stable but you must trade some ease of use to get this - BSD tools v GNU tools are also hard to go back to! (eg. ls -h is gone)

For a server: Debian - the only decision is to go stable or testing. Once installed it can be maintained via ssh (putty on windows) using apt-get. My server has 100 day uptime so far (testing)... also you only need to install what you really need to get the system running eg: apache, php, no X11 etc. Fedora is a buggy and they keep releasing new versions on CD/DVD - painfull. Gentoo is for people with too much time on their hands who want to know what every text file in /etc/ does - stay well clear unless you are SUPER hardcore geek

There is a XOOPS channel on freenode but it never has more than 5 people in it. Do people not like irc and prefer the forums or is irc to old school?

If you have not used irc before why not try chatzilla for Firefox. Once the extension is installed and Firefox restarted click on this link to join the #xoops channel.

irc://freenode/xoops

Thanks ackbarr. I installed it on my test site (along with all the other calendars) but there are some problems with the date links. It seems to ignore the &getdate=20041011 statements and jumps to Jan1.

If you are going to integrate the new 2.0 version then it may not be worth fixing this version. For my needs I also suspect that even phpicalendar version 2.0 will have the features I need. For example, unless you do a lot of work there will presumably not be a Minicalendar block or a Coming Events blocks that can be displayed on the front page. phpicalendar's support for event details also seems quite limited: eg. in iCal you can have Attendees, Status, Description, URL, Notes, etc. but these don't seem to be supported yet - even in 2.0.

I may stick to piCal for now. Here are some random thoughts on the other calendars:

AgendaX does not seem to support event times (just days) yet.
eCal - events not marked on minicalendar
eXtcal - users cannot add events

It is a shame that there is no calendar system in the XOOPS core. I would have thought most sites would use this feature and other CMS systems have this built in (eg. drupal, geeklog). With the recent release of Mozilla Sunbird, and the power of iCal, it also seems sensible to make the use of ics and dav publishing a priority as these may become more commonplace soon. Check this drupal thread on events calendar development.

http://test.postdoc.ucla.edu

Cheers

No sign of xCal on Ackbarr's site... anyone seen a download recently?

No problem, xhelp looks fantastic but I think it is too complicated for my users (they struggle with posting to the forum )

I'll post to the dev.xoops.org pages once I have thought of any other cool features.

Thanks ejuden01,

One minor bug while I remember: if you "update status" but leave the description blank it diverts to:

/modules/sstatus/admin/addMemo.php?id=2 and not
/modules/sstatus/addMemo.php?id=2

Possible updates:

1) It would be nice to have a link to the "update status" page from the user area.

2) As I said above it would be good to move the "update status" page out of the admin area for normal users - admin area is scary.

I will look into making the changes myself - is the CVS up to date or is there a branch that I should use?

Thanks for your very quick response

I tried a few modules but sstatus looks to be the best.

I found how to fix sstatus in this thread and it now looks good.

At the moment it seems that the "Update a Service Status" appears in the Admin area. This will scare my users big time Maybe I should post in the sstatus forum on the dev site but if you read this Akbarr could you tell me if you are still developing sstatus?

Does anyone know of a module which I could adapt to do the following:

I have a set of tasks for my users to carry out. I want the module to allow each of the users to indicate that they have done one of the tasks.

Example: An advertising poster needs to be put in different buildings around campus. When someone has done a building they can tick it off from the list.

Task 1
Put poster 1 in:
Building A Done by Bob
Building B Not done
Building C Done by Bill
etc.

Task 2
Put poster 2 in:
Building A Not done
Building B Done by Fred
Building C Not done
etc.

xHelp was my first choice but this has 1 task, 1 person done. I would have to setup the same task many times for each buildling.

I tried sstatus from the modules cvs, but this was quite buggy.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Graham

On a similar issue (probably fixed in CVS )... Polls from a private forum - in a block - are displayed to anonymous users on the front page.