just for some general feedback and ideas really
been tinkering on it for some time now and the idea has been there even longer.

i wanted to make a quite unlike xoops, XOOPS theme and you will see what i mean if you look at it.

http://web.80110x.com/

it looks best in firefox atm as i havent totally sorted the ie png problem
and the main layout css hasn't been written in yet, but this is a proof of concept for me really.

all the menus change depending on if you are logged in or not.

cheers
hal9000

Refreshing change to see an uncluttered page! Nice use of rotating logo images. The menu system is very important in this sort of theme, Seeing users will be relying on this I would be inclined to use on_hover rather than on_click to open the menu list. Just speeds things upo a bit. Also make sure the menu system is Search engine friendly or you won't get any pages crawled.

Another thought... seeing you're not using side blocks, why dont you move the smarty code elsewhere, ie into the top and bottom center areas to make you central content more flexible.

Nice theme ...Good creative thinking hal9000.

what png problem.... (ie 7 supports the alpha layer transparency)

you can use this

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/

but for some reason the javascript screwes my computer up :( also if its set as a background that wont fix it. You may also want to know about the gamma levels in pngs.


I also have this at my site as an example

http://www.foreverbroken.org/modules/wordpress/?p=13

Nice and clean layout! Since I'm a newbie I was wondering if you could steer me in the right direction?. I'd like to accomplish something similar. I'd like to have just two columns. A side column for the menus like log in and such. and to the right of that another column which would contain a message board, or some other content with out having things blocked or stunted in in muliple columns. Is that a themes or template issue?

Your site for instance has just one main column with a header. And when the viewer come to your site he/she sees content which may or may not entice them to login for more goodies.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think what most people want is a forum, and attractive design, and meaningful content, without spattering news, recent news, headline news, etc, all over the site in left, right, center ,center left, ok ok, I'll stop now

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Thanks Dan from New Hampshire

i would have to agree dan - to much information isnt a good thing.
the simple answer to your problem i think it that you can do it either way. It kinda depends on what you might like to do with it in future (expansion or site development)
you best bet is to use XOOPS in its almost standard 3 coloumn layout and just dont assign any modules for the right coloumn.
that way you would have just a left for your menu options and the centre for your default module - such as the forum.

you could then use centre left and right for things like updated news and feeds.
I think as standard these appear after the main centre module - so it would be an enticer for the user to read more.

hope some of that helps (xmt is a good module to start basing things on and is well layed out with info for a new XOOPS user)
hal9000

Thanks for your thought carnuke - i will be making that menu open on hover - i don't know why i didn't.

how would i go about make the menu searchable? somehow fix it by sorting the robots.txt file?

i wish i had more time to work on this - far to many commitments right now grrr