Hi,
First I discovered xoops, and I thought it was good. ;).
On the second day, I tried to install xoops, and failed miserably on the MySQL setup (probably because my shared hosting provider doesn't have a clear faq on what server the MySQL database resides on, and if my passwords are the same on the ssh/web login and the MySQL server, and my lack of understanding if I should enter a MySQL user/password or my hosting account user/password.
Then I discovered a web script at my hosting provider called "Fantastico" that allows point-and-click installation of common server-side scripts. Among those, Xoops.
So on the fourth day I had xoops.org running. And I thought it was good. But then I started reading about XOOPS and started getting confused by the lingo. For instance, what are blocks?. When I create "sections", do these refer to the news module?. I even tried reading the "Visual Guide to xoops" which was not very visual at all (besides some irrelevant screenshots).
My needs are simple: I'd need to setup a news site that would show the site logo at the top, followed by all the story headlines, with subtitle and date (and ONLY story headlines, not including a lead or summary!). My goal is to have news headlines displayed in two in two columns and sorted by date (last posted appears first).
like this:
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SITE LOGO HERE
Date, log-in / search
---------------------------------------------
STORY 4 TITLE[link] STORY 3 TITLE[link]
Subtitle here Subtitle here
02/26/05 01:30am 02/25/05 11:51am
STORY 2 TITLE[link] STORY 1 TITLE[link]
Subtitle here Subtitle here
02/25/05 10:30am 02/24/05 12:51am
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Copyright message...
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On the left side, the news sections as buttons, and on the right side, an advertising banner.
However, I've found that most CMS systems I have tried feature an slashdot-esque news module that's not exactly what I want.
Any XOOPS module does what I'm looking for?.
Perhaps for the "next big XOOPS release" it would be possible for you guys to design a "start page editor" that would work in pseudo-wysiwyg mode letting one define box sizes (in pixels or screen percentage) and move boxes around, just like "my netscape" works? (see
http://my.netscape.com ).
FC
