Season's greetings folks! I'm a designer/developer in the midst of evaluating several open source CMSs for an upcoming project. I adopted a pure css layout and strict standards compliance philosophy some time ago and need to know if XOOPS can accommodate that.
Cheers!

it sure can..

there's quite a number of pure CSS themes around lately.

and even some pure CSS 3 column themes.. (it's a real ***** trying to get 3 columns CSS themes rendering across all browsers too)

yes there are css themes, sometimes not too much well written or compatible, as far as I know there aren't 3 much columuns themes tableless really working good.

but answering to your question smg I have to say that if you can have validated and accessible themes (growing fast in XOOPS community) this can't be said about core and modules.
Nearly all the html generated by XOOPS is with tables inside, not WAI written, and there are some validation error.
The situation get even worse with modules, sometimes generating bad code and never tableless (maybe article and few other have some tableless template).

Now the positive part... slowly but with good quality the interest for valid and accessible html/css output is growing in XOOPS community. The future 2.3 version is very focused on this point.
I add that templating for XOOPS is very easy and has a fast learning curve, this thanks to smarty powered template system and to some fixed css class that nearly all modules use for layout.

From my side I'm trying to develope a good 3 columns tableless template and I released a basic theme for XOOPS (search for Scratchy in the news), projected to be the starting point for easy template creation, with all classes and html you need for xoops, but without any styling or layout.

Hope you'll join this great community and cms

Ian

Thanks for your quick responses. That's a definite plus in itself!

In terms of solid 3-column layouts, a starting point for several of my static sites has been Tonico Strasser's "Flexible Layout" (http://www.webproducer.at/flexible-layout). It could be the ticket if it ports well into the XOOPS themeing format.

you can surely port it.
Negative padding tecnique is one of the most effective for 3 columns layouts, is this working with sides column of similar eight and not influenced by the main background?

Anyway you won't need javascript for playing with columns, using smarty sintax you'll be able to set your container width based on the presence or not of sides column. And you want need to put code for ie browsers in the theme because theme engine can redirect you to the right style for your browser

ciao
Ian

I just noticed this thread and suggest you might be interested in this effort of mine:

https://xoops.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3633

Any/all input from this audience is most appreciated.