Hi,
can XOOPS compete with joomla? well, maybe six months ago that this Project was called once Mambo, but today, I don't think so. Why?
First of all, I should say we are not organized at all. Look to the home page of Xoops.org, how often this news section get updated? how often we spend our time to contribute to Xoops? Well, I think, you know the answer: We do not contribute to Xoops.org as the way other people at Joomla Project do. I really do not want to offend people here, but there are possibly only 10 to 15 people here who are really active, and other 36816-36800 members are those who are not really involved in the project, whereas in Joomla.org, although this Project is only two-three months old, I see more activity being done there.
Why is this Happening?I tell you why? Because we (Not sure about others by certainly me) are getting bored of Xoops. In additon, it's been a year and half that we are expecting to see a re-designed theme at this website, but the webmasters are still postponing this Project at Xoops.org. Come one guys, if designing a professional theme for XOOPS is that much difficult for the creators of the Extensible Object Oriented Portal System Project, then how are you expecting the newbie people to use this Project? This is the OFFICIAL XOOPS WEBSITE, Yet, here the webmasters have not decided to create a theme for this website and the Irony is that Xoops.org is the *Official* website of a server-side web page generating application, that should allow the user to create beautiful webpages easily, not to create ugly web content only. Further more, instead of just coding for the administration area of a webpage, we need to pay attention to the user side of the website as well, and that is related to graphics, themes and other layout relating material. Just look at Joomla.org, everyday a professional writer wrties the news about the community, the development and the new websites, whereas at Xoops.org the News section is barely updated(maybe once a week at most). At Joomla.org, every time a member joins the development team, a news article is written for him/her explaining his/her experiences, how she/he can contribute to the community and his/her personal info including a picture. At Xoops.org, however, if we ever hear of someone joining the community, we do not get know anything about that person, and only the user ID might be included. These kinds of meterials help the Joomla community grow faster and become more active and that's what makes them get ahead of us.
How to solve this issue?Well, the first step we can take to solve issue is to creat a news team. As I know now, there are only a few people involved in this area and we need more users to write about the new activities being done at dev.xoops.org, Xoops.org and XOOPS local support websites.
Thus, the WOX team should be expanded to atleast 15-20 people who are really involved and active.
Second step and probably I should have named it the first step since it is the most important part of the project, is the Xoops.org redesignment. We need to atleast redesign Xoops.org every once to motivate the users to be active at this website and to show them how great is Xoops. To do this, we need to create a XOOPS Theme Design Team (Which I almost created few months ago , but since no one joined I canceled it). This team will be responsible for Xoops.org themes and logos for specific events or periods of the year. To illustrate, for a big event such as Christmas, a new logo specially designed for Christmas should be created with a new Theme coming with it. Or for New year, Easter, Aids day, July 2nd(Canada Day), July 4th(USA Day),Holloween or any other special event, a newly edited logo with a theme should be created just like what Google.com does for such events.
The next step is our XOOPS Campaign ,(which started a few weeks ago, but it seems it's cancelled now). In this campaign we need to put alot of effort. Such that, we showl creat banners, wallpapers, psp-Wallpapers, screen savers, theme,firfox themes and etc.
Our last and one of the most improtant step, is to release more updates to XOOPS core. As all of us know, XOOPS 2.2 was to be released last year, but after a year it is released now. An even now, there are many people who complain about it. So we need to do more testing, more coding and adding more features to XOOPS core system. Again, this can be done by promoting Xoops, and by creating an organized community.
Hopefully, we can achieve such goals, otherwise The XOOPS Project will eventually die.
So, Wake up guys, Roll the Wheel, and lets get this project going on the right track NOW!Thanks in advance for reading this,
Alitan{{<<>>}}
