tzvook, Thanks for your help earlier!
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This is the only problem which keeps me stuck in the planning stage of my website development. I am running a test XOOPS site, in parallel to original, on it's own database. I am cloning modules, multi-install xoops, category modules, themes with dedicated columns (5 subjects/columns: 1 per theme/categories), using groups in unique ways... I am getting closer to a final structure I could be comfortable with.

But again...
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I don't even know where I stand anymore.

Multi-Sites
This thread may be of interest to some. This guy works hard and is developing something great, which may help in our situation.

yep Wheeler
This " Multi-Sites " is a great mod/functionality and I'm planning to use it in the future, but it's not answering on the need of one site (not a site network) with it's modules that need to have a few pages that includes categories from different modules (especially forum, news, links, one of the galleries, articles) - meaning: a site which show it's content by subjects/categories/groups or whatever you call it, and not by modules.
I'm going to try to find a way for modules to get a category content in a separate block ...

Have you tried the metacat module? I haven't tried it myself but it sounds like it might be what you're looking for.

Rowd

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tzvook, could you provide more examples of what you are looking for? i'm having trouble visualizing what you're saying.

Rowdie
I didn't heard of it b4, but looking for a bit of opinion about it I found out that our little thread here was discussed in the CORE level, which means that there might be a global category system embaded in Xoops.
take a look @ this thread ... ... ... the thing is that it started by Herko at the begining of 2002 and we are about entering 2005 ...

Can it be that XOOPS is moving so slowly in the last 2 years ? .. an idea is being brought to the air and dies slowly for almost 3 years?

bd_csmc
this thread is what I was talking about .... I just found it.
Herko, skalpa, Bunny and the rest saw the need @ 2002 and for some reason all was forgotten.
If you ask me it's one thing XOOPS can't live without beacuse in most cases you need your content to be folowed by categories and not by modules

And to be acurate:
today XOOPS sites looks like this

Homepage
module 1:
- category one
- category 2
- category 3

module 2:
- category one
- category 2
- category 3

module 3:
- category one
- category 2
- category 3

Now, it's good for a few sites, but not for most.
The natural content flow is :

Site category 1:
- module one category 1
- module 2 category 1
- module 2 category 1

Site category 2:
- module one category 2
- module 2 category 2
- module 3 category 2

This brought me to a situation that every time I want to use XOOPS for a project, I ends up giving it to a much worse cms, but with a better "content flow" and I feel very bad about it, XOOPS is the best in functionality and stability, but ..... in the end what counts is the content, the CMS is just serving the content.

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I think the thread you referred to explains this ... fundamental changes to the way the core works.

However you are right content tends to be dictated by what module you are viewing. Another route round this would be to develop a 'super content module' that handled different content genres altogether. Dare we say, a plugin for article management, and a plugin for image galleries etc ?? Thus all the site content is effectively in one module and inter-related.

I think by virtue of the fact that this thread was started indicates possible changes in the next major version of xoops.

BTW Ive just looked at metacat module, and it appears that it may produce new categories based on reading data from other module categories. The setup if fairly involved, so I need to play with this for a bit first.

tzvook, what are some of the CMSes that you've used, that have this method of content flow?

maybe Drupal, Mambo?

i'd like to take a look at the ways another cms implements what you guys need, which is why i ask.

tzvook:

I couldn't agree more with you!!
I really love xoops, I've tested many other cms's but none is close to XOOPS in performance, and customistion, etc.

But ( allways that wfull Word appears ….  ) I find the same problem than you, so I´ll go further with an example to try and clarify the concept for those who posted some comments here .

Imagine a Site about Cycling, e. g. my own site http://www.masciclismo.com actually it’s target audience is kind ob obvious “people interested in cycling” but… there are many specialties within cycling (e.g. Road, MTB, BMX, etc. ) so there is a need for “categories” , and also within each one of these cats. The “modules” should be the same eg, forums, news, products/ reviews, etc.

And also there would be topics of common interest for all. And also many people are interested in more than one topic.

And I know many visitors don’t even know there are other interesting content for them in other modules, or they are too lazy to go to each module to find out what´s new on “Their subject”

Besides a best practise here would be that if they go to a desired section, there they will find all different types of contents (EG modules / blocks) related to this subject so they stay around for a wile reading everything that’s of their interest, instead of doing searches along the site (or worse multiple sites).

Another good example is a site (which i´m not related at all with, and that runs on it’s own custom CMS) called http://www.enplenitud.com which is a community site for “Young people over 40…” as they call it.

If you look around you can see that their site is built into channels, and them into areas, and them into sections, where all contents for each area of interest can be related to more than one cat/ area, and also when you read an article you get hints to other related content ( keyword related) so people really stick around ( and they seem to be doing quite well since they have over 220.000 members!!).

Anyway, I don’t expect exactly this, but it would be great if it was a relatively simple way to present content from different modules related to keywords or categories.

I actually don’t have a clue how to do it, specially cuz’ I’m not a programmer, I’ve tried with some kind pre-defined search block to include aside of the news items , but couldn’t make it work ( but this simple trick would help a lot since a search could present all kind of contents related to one subject – that could be the news title or category).

Does anybody Knows How to do this? Specially avoiding the troubles Mithrandir posted on this thread??

bd_csmc

I used Drupal (just once, not good enough), I use CuteNews (We moded it a lot, to turn it into a cms and made a Hebrew version, We use a simple CMS (php+mysql) that was made inside our company, we tried Iware, MySource, we used XOOPS (the days of 1.3.x + a dhdfhd with 2.05) and most of the time, we write our sites using custom php/asp routins (so much time is wasted to get a medium results) ...

But as I said - I like XOOPS so much that it is being installed on 3 of our local dev servers - winxp+IIS , winXP+Apach , Linux+apach ... all this ... for using XOOPS twice in the last 3 years...

So back to your question: MySource (and it's matrix) are a good ones to check, PROPS is quite interesting but is not a regular cms ...
If we found a cms that has "the feature we are talking about" this thread was never here ...