Is this a discussion about creating a vision and a roadmap for the future, or discussion about a roadmap that has already been decided upon?

Because right now, it feels a lot like the latter and I am quite certain that that is not where we need to stand right now. A few days ago, there wasn't even a mention of XOOPS 4 and right now there is a roadmap ahead for the next few things:
- XMF 2.0
- XOOPS Business Objects (XBO)
- XOOPS Theme Framework
- XOOPS Modern Admin Theme
- XOOPS Widgets System
- XOOPS Pagebuilder
- XOOPS Smarty 4 Plugin Library
- cssHolmes

Next to that, a decision has already made about module compatibility, there are marketing posts up for things like the Smarty 4 Plugin Library (that feel like they are AI generated) and a post about XOOPS 4.0 being announced while no consensus about XOOPS 4.0 was reached at all.

The videos that are added are also not a good medium to convince people - the reality is that few people will want to view multiple AI-voiced videos, slides and on average less than 10 people have seen each video.

Before we go to concrete lengths and decide on specific things to implement and how, we need to first check and align in what the vision of all of us is going to be for the future.
That means that no decisions should be made yet about what is going to be included in the next version of XOOPS, but rather, that we align and try to propose what things are that need to be realized in the future.

In all honesty, with how broad and expansive the changes that are already outlined in your first post, mean that there is a very high chance of this version of XOOPS 4.0 to never release or remain in development hell for a long time.

A lot of the changes impact a lot of XOOPS, but instead of adding to XOOPS, we also need to be able to question what is already there: XOOPS has a lot of areas that need touching up and polishing.

I'm also not opposed with XOOPS 4 introducing breaking changes for modules - XOOPS is not a museum and the reality probably is that only a few modules are seeing active use. It's better to focus on quality modules rather than quantity, as times have also changed.

In order to have a healthy discussion about the future, we need to start with a blank canvas for the vision and road map - not put us in front of a road map that was decided without consensus.

I'll try to post some suggestions and visions for the future later this week.

Kevin

I'm sorry for the mistake in my wording, I ment to say that this release has been coming for quite a while

What needs to happen for XOOPS 2.5.12 before we can release it? Is there a list of issues and things that need to be tackled?

Hey all,

I have noticed that XOOPS.org has become extremely slow the last few times I have used it - I now that historically, the hosting of XOOPS has been done by a list of companies going back years and years ago with it being sponsored for a while even.
A lot of consolidation has happened in the webhosting market and the current host of xoops.org, Arvixe, has been acquired in a loop where a company gets acquired and the websites get moved to new hardware with very strict resource limitations set on it. That has led to the XOOPS.org website being extremely slow, while the costs for the hosting have probably increased a lot.
The same thing has happened with a lot of web hosters, all being acquired by Newfold Digital, Inc (who used to be known as Endurance Group). They're known for this kind of thing where they acquire good webhosts and then just drop all kinds of support/outsource it, performance gets really bad and prices go up.

I have been having real issues today where several pages just refuse to load or take VERY long to load and I suspect others are also having the same issues.
I also had issues where a password reset link didn't want to send (Failed to write message to sendmail (broken pipe).)

Instead of continuing to use Arvixe (of which the price and performance will only worsen), I would suggest we look into another hosting partner/provider that isn't a part of Newfold Digital, Inc and perhaps even go with a VPS at a provider like DigitalOcean, which will likely provide a MUCH better performance to price ratio.

Previously, I worked at the biggest webhost in my (European) country, so I do have a lot of experience with webhosting, tweaking things and managing a server. I am absolutely willing to offer support here to help manage a server or help improve the configuration/tweaking things. But right now, xoops.org has gotten so slow that something needs to happen.

An honest question here, but what is currently in active development? Please don't see this as an attack but I have been looking at some of the branches recently and it was difficult for me to figure out what and where the development was actually happening.

I saw the news post stating that work has started on 2.7, but there's barely any movement there. Then I saw this that there is no active development happening on 2.6. There's been a new version of XOOPS 2.5 that has been in development and in alpha for literally years and I tried to look at which point I could enter and help with some improvements, to brush up my PHP, but simply don't where I can help with the development and what still needs to happen before a new release can happen - what would the entrypoint be?

Please don't necro threads that are originally 9 years old with a last post from 2011.
Make a new thread, makes it easier for people to find the information.

You do realize that the article that you linked in fact promotes an EIG company?

In general, every webhost that supports PHP will run XOOPS. That much is certain - however, not all hosts are the same. I'll talk a bit about normal hosters (for normal users).

A lot depends on how their servers are set up: what versions of PHP do they use? In general, you want a webhost that upgrades their version of PHP quite often, as these updates really do benefit your site in both speed and security (or perhaps even new features).
Next to that, it also matters how the database is installed and how it's used. In most cases, the database is installed on the same servers (which isn't a bad thing - I've got the same setup on my own servers). Some hosts choose to create one huge server for their database which is only used for databases - which is also a good approach. The good thing between having a seperate server for your data and your database is that in general, you prefer having a database server with lots of RAM and some CPU, but these don't need hundreds of gigabytes of space. A server which stores data doesn't really need that much RAM, but it does benefit greatly from having a ton of disk space.

Another point that, aside from the servers, plays a role is the operating system - in general, Linux hosting is vastly superior to Windows (the main reason for this is that Windows is very resource heavy compared to Linux, and for webhosting the last thing you need is a GUI). The choice of software is also important - normal hosts often provide you with Apache, though some hosts tend to use Nginx too. The best solution, in my opinion, is to use Apache behind an nginx proxy. That way, the benefits of both are used (Apache is very powerful, but that comes at a price in terms of performance. Nginx is very fast, but isn't as good with plugins like PHP and can't work with htaccess files. It's also harder to set up).

I've read in this thread that some hosts oversell - and yes, most of them do. But this isn't a bad thing - this is just a way to make sure you use your resources to the max. If done carefully, this isn't an issue at all and you shouldn't notice it. 90% of customers never use even half of their available space and resources - it would be a waste to keep your servers at only half of it's capacity. However, there are hosts who oversell to such a degree that their service completely degrades to a very low level. This is mostly seen with budget hosters, where simple PHP scripts take up to 10-20 times longer compared to a "good" webhost.
Overselling in itself though, if done correctly, is hardly an issue and completely normal.

The biggest thing which seperates bad hosts and good hosts is backups. This is a dealbreaker, as most hosts don't even talk about this on their site - most often, it's not mentioned, and if it is, it is worded vaguely.
A good webhost takes backups for you and stores these for several days (up to month in some cases), they have the ability to restore your website for you. Most cheap hosts don't offer backups - hell, who says they even backup at all? I've seen it happen enough. And if they have a backup, most likely it's the entire machine, so that in an emergency, they can restore the machine... but they can't restore a specific file for you.
Another sign of a good host is that they have something called hot-failover, which means that when the server goes down, another one takes it over instantly. This is rarely seen in budget hosting (if at all). Even for business hosting this is rare.
The way this works is that you're either hosted on virtual machines on a hypervisor, or you're hosted on a physical server which is linked to a SAN (storage area network), which is linked to the servers. If one of the servers encounters an error, this will be noticed by other servers, which will then choose one server to take over the tasks of the primary server and will use the SAN to boot up the websites once again. This is mostly seen at companies :)

The very LAST thing which makes a webhost good, or bad, is customer service. If the service is good, you don't need them at all. In fact, some of the best hosts I have ever had had something which you would likely call bad service. Should the service go down, you'd see it on their status page, but nothing else. They focused on SOLVING the issue, not talking about the issue.
Good service is when you ask something, they know what you're talking about (in my case though, that's rather rare since I'm a Linux professional).
In terms of billing - that's a shared responsibility. Arvixe most likely uses a service to do the billing, and most likely they've marked your actions as likely to be fraudulous. Not to say that's good or acceptable, but it's understandable.
I don't think your site would go down in an instant just because your billing failed once. Most hosts give you a warning before taking an action, unless it's spamming or billing fraud. Which is something that could be arranged.

And while I might agree that Arvixe isn't the best host on the planet, it's far from as bad as you're saying here. I have had hosts that had an uptime of 80%, with an SLA of 99% and they refused to conform to their own terms (refunds).
Arvixe is afaik hosting/donating a part of the XOOPS infrastructure.

The only thing I can say is, if you really want good hosting, you're going to need to go to the high-end hosting or do it all yourself on a VPS (DigitalOcean or Vultr might be a good choice then). But keep in mind, you're responsible yourself then for backups/configuration/security - it's not an easy task. And real good hosting, which has everything that I've said in this post, doesn't come for less than €50 a month.

I myself have 3 servers running right now, 2 of them at DigitalOcean (one as a master and one as a slave as backup), the other one being my monitor and TeamSpeak server, hosted at Scaleway.