1
Let's talk.
This is a big deal for me because I have just spent a pretty long time exploring a vast wilderness of systems. I've tried Drupal, Mambo, Joomla (or however its spelled), Typo3, TikiWiki, Twiki, Wordpress, PhPBB, and a whole lot of others that I either cannot remember or don't want to remember. Almost against my will, I was always pulled back to Xoops. Out of all of the choices that I tried, Drupal came the closest to winning me over. It came so close, but even it couldn't do it.
When I originally discovered the world of content management systems, I knew that I wanted something that Icould be sure would be around tomorrow. I wanted something that was easy to update, easy to install, and easy to work with on a daily basis. I wanted something that was flexible enough to make a corporate site, a small blog, a gaming community, and monstrous knowledge database. In short, what I wanted was something that was pretty hard to find. I spent months researching. First, I tied to setup and use mambo but I was quickly frustrated by the community, the documentation. Mambo just didn't feel right for a beginner. Then I tried Xoops.
You know, it is interesting but outside of xoops.org, it is difficult to find people who advocate the usage of Xoops. I don't even remember how I found this place originally. I think I just went through the content management systems at sourceforge one by one. I had already spent a few months fiddling with demos and I had built a few wikis and forums, but my project at the time required something more advanced.
I played around with XOOPS long enough to figure out that it was able to do what I needed and that I could deploy it quickly. Well, I was right and wrong. My first experience with XOOPS was a mixed bag at best - some things worked out well, some things kept me up late into the night trying to work around. It was a mission critical site that, though intended for only 20 people, attracted well over 80 by the time the need for it had passed. For me, it was a learning experience, and a very stressful one to boot.
After that experience, I went back into my exploring. Only this time, I was really looking for a replacement for a system that I had used. I figured that with XOOPS to compare against, it would only take a moment or two before I found a suitable replacement. First, I went back to mambo. Although I was more experienced, I still found mambo to be extremely frustrating. Mambots, mambothis, mambothat - it was a bit too big for me. It was like wandering around in a big city with no roadmap. After a while, I realized that Mambo made it easy to make a simple site and somewhat more challenging to make something more complicated than that. The mambo community was, compared to XOOPS (even though I never posted here, just lurked), a bit on the impersonal side. I prefer to read forums than ask questions and I could never bring myself to ask anything on the Mambo forums. The commercialization of so much stuff was also disorienting as I am a lover of open source and I find it difficult to believe that an open source project can blend commercial and open source without eventually losing that friendly open source feeling.
The next content management system that I dove into was Drupal. Drupal seemed to hold the key to everything. It was a true content management system construction kit. It was the first CMS that, out of the box, seemed to offer all of the features that I had originally wanted in a CMS. There was just one major problem. While I found drupal to be a dream come true, I had a hard time explaining to others why that was the case and showing others how to work with it. It occurred to me that most of my difficulty came from the fact that I honestly didn't fully grasp the complexity of drupal myself. I realized that it would take me months to learn it, and I also realized that even if I finally mastered Drupal I would never really be able to contribute to the community like I wanted to because web design is my trade and, frankly speaking, Drupal is not the best system to use when you are trying to rapidly get moderately complicated sites completed. With Drupal, before each project, it is important to fully plan each and every project before you start or the result will be sub-par.
So, here I am again. This time, I intend to save myself a great deal of time and effort and stick with it, and I can tell you (whoever might read this) why I am sticking with it. XOOPS may not be perfect, but it has strengths that you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere. The greatest strength of XOOPS is the community. The community leaders are intelligent, incredibly friendly, and informative. The community itself is both active and growing. The project itself is rolling into an exciting new direction that I would be happy to be able to contribute to and take part in. In an open source project, you either have a good community or you don't and from what I have seen it is immensely difficult if not impossible to develop a community of the type that XOOPS has if you don't already have one. The second greatest strength that XOOPS has is its own balance. Xoops, as a content management system, has achieved a masterful balance between features, flexibility, stability, and security. XOOPS is the swiss army knife of the content management systems. It can be deployed rapidly, used to great effect, and applied to a great variety of tasks. The module system that is employed for XOOPS is one of the most durable of any content management system that I have tried. I should probably stop while I am ahead, so I will just say that I have tried a lot of CMSs and I have found XOOPS to be the best (for me).
Note: The above is just the opinion of one person, myself, and it is a rather long post - if you make it this far I congratulate you. A number of my problems with most content management systems come from my own nature as a variety of perfectionist. If I can't do something just right then I will not do it. A summary of things is that XOOPS is the only content management system that gives me the control I like without sacrificing too much time. Unlike Drupal, with XOOPS I am confident that after I gather all of the knowledge i need in one conveniently accessible archive I will be able to shut off approximately 97% of my brain and just use it, confident that everything will work as I told it too.
Errrrr..... No. I was not payed to write that.
This is a big deal for me because I have just spent a pretty long time exploring a vast wilderness of systems. I've tried Drupal, Mambo, Joomla (or however its spelled), Typo3, TikiWiki, Twiki, Wordpress, PhPBB, and a whole lot of others that I either cannot remember or don't want to remember. Almost against my will, I was always pulled back to Xoops. Out of all of the choices that I tried, Drupal came the closest to winning me over. It came so close, but even it couldn't do it.
When I originally discovered the world of content management systems, I knew that I wanted something that Icould be sure would be around tomorrow. I wanted something that was easy to update, easy to install, and easy to work with on a daily basis. I wanted something that was flexible enough to make a corporate site, a small blog, a gaming community, and monstrous knowledge database. In short, what I wanted was something that was pretty hard to find. I spent months researching. First, I tied to setup and use mambo but I was quickly frustrated by the community, the documentation. Mambo just didn't feel right for a beginner. Then I tried Xoops.
You know, it is interesting but outside of xoops.org, it is difficult to find people who advocate the usage of Xoops. I don't even remember how I found this place originally. I think I just went through the content management systems at sourceforge one by one. I had already spent a few months fiddling with demos and I had built a few wikis and forums, but my project at the time required something more advanced.
I played around with XOOPS long enough to figure out that it was able to do what I needed and that I could deploy it quickly. Well, I was right and wrong. My first experience with XOOPS was a mixed bag at best - some things worked out well, some things kept me up late into the night trying to work around. It was a mission critical site that, though intended for only 20 people, attracted well over 80 by the time the need for it had passed. For me, it was a learning experience, and a very stressful one to boot.
After that experience, I went back into my exploring. Only this time, I was really looking for a replacement for a system that I had used. I figured that with XOOPS to compare against, it would only take a moment or two before I found a suitable replacement. First, I went back to mambo. Although I was more experienced, I still found mambo to be extremely frustrating. Mambots, mambothis, mambothat - it was a bit too big for me. It was like wandering around in a big city with no roadmap. After a while, I realized that Mambo made it easy to make a simple site and somewhat more challenging to make something more complicated than that. The mambo community was, compared to XOOPS (even though I never posted here, just lurked), a bit on the impersonal side. I prefer to read forums than ask questions and I could never bring myself to ask anything on the Mambo forums. The commercialization of so much stuff was also disorienting as I am a lover of open source and I find it difficult to believe that an open source project can blend commercial and open source without eventually losing that friendly open source feeling.
The next content management system that I dove into was Drupal. Drupal seemed to hold the key to everything. It was a true content management system construction kit. It was the first CMS that, out of the box, seemed to offer all of the features that I had originally wanted in a CMS. There was just one major problem. While I found drupal to be a dream come true, I had a hard time explaining to others why that was the case and showing others how to work with it. It occurred to me that most of my difficulty came from the fact that I honestly didn't fully grasp the complexity of drupal myself. I realized that it would take me months to learn it, and I also realized that even if I finally mastered Drupal I would never really be able to contribute to the community like I wanted to because web design is my trade and, frankly speaking, Drupal is not the best system to use when you are trying to rapidly get moderately complicated sites completed. With Drupal, before each project, it is important to fully plan each and every project before you start or the result will be sub-par.
So, here I am again. This time, I intend to save myself a great deal of time and effort and stick with it, and I can tell you (whoever might read this) why I am sticking with it. XOOPS may not be perfect, but it has strengths that you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere. The greatest strength of XOOPS is the community. The community leaders are intelligent, incredibly friendly, and informative. The community itself is both active and growing. The project itself is rolling into an exciting new direction that I would be happy to be able to contribute to and take part in. In an open source project, you either have a good community or you don't and from what I have seen it is immensely difficult if not impossible to develop a community of the type that XOOPS has if you don't already have one. The second greatest strength that XOOPS has is its own balance. Xoops, as a content management system, has achieved a masterful balance between features, flexibility, stability, and security. XOOPS is the swiss army knife of the content management systems. It can be deployed rapidly, used to great effect, and applied to a great variety of tasks. The module system that is employed for XOOPS is one of the most durable of any content management system that I have tried. I should probably stop while I am ahead, so I will just say that I have tried a lot of CMSs and I have found XOOPS to be the best (for me).
Note: The above is just the opinion of one person, myself, and it is a rather long post - if you make it this far I congratulate you. A number of my problems with most content management systems come from my own nature as a variety of perfectionist. If I can't do something just right then I will not do it. A summary of things is that XOOPS is the only content management system that gives me the control I like without sacrificing too much time. Unlike Drupal, with XOOPS I am confident that after I gather all of the knowledge i need in one conveniently accessible archive I will be able to shut off approximately 97% of my brain and just use it, confident that everything will work as I told it too.
Errrrr..... No. I was not payed to write that.
