Hello and thank you for reading my post.

Please bear with me for a bit while I introduce the subject.

I am considering to include XOOPS in our web site to be the comunity part of it as well as integrate a lot of functionality on the site, also integrating the site itself to this new community.

As far as I could read and check on the installation (I actually installed it for testing purposes) I am very impressed by the organization and code practices.

We have a website that has heavy usage (90+ TB of data per month) and an extensive amount of pages. We are now developing the second version of the site, since the first version is blotted to the roof and was not created for this heavy usage. The new design is ready and most of the main pages already programmed. It is all done in PHP.

We have the expertize and experience to create a new social network interaction to the site, but the experience shows me that when something good is available and you may adapt it to your needs you should use it. That is how I came upon Xoops.

I would need your advice in the following:

1) what would be the best approach to "add" XOOPS to our site? We do not intend to use XOOPS framework to handle the entire functionality of our site, but to use it as part of the site itself. What is very important is to do those modifications to the XOOPS structure without changing the core of it in a way that may be easily upgradable so we keep up with all the updates. Seems to me that the best way to do that is to create or adapt a template to be included as part of our main site, but please let me know your advice.

2) Is XOOPS SEO compatible and how compatible is it to the major SEs? Seems so but I would like to ask if anyone has good experience using it with Google or other SE.

Thank you in advance in helping us,

All the best,

Rom Pereira

Xoops and SEO:

1) Any site added to Xoops.org will instantly rank....
2) My own site, though has had a lot of free ads placed, also displays most pages across the top of Google, above paid for advertising....

So XOOPS and Search engines it seems to love it more then most....
Also a lot of our module developers work on improving XOOPS even more always.....so you have a team backing of people finding new ideas that work and improving from what is found....

Your Idea on how to use XOOPS can easily be done; XOOPS is very good at wrapping any content in its self, so displaying an overall theme.....
This would take making some form of modules, which basically would include the header and footer and so keeping an overall look of everything....
The pages all can contain Meta data and with the Meta data module you can even change per page....


The reason you may want your content including in XOOPS modules, is as then if it is a community you are after, things like who is online, would work across the site.

Also then any previous pages that are html loaded through use of a smarty template in a module would increase loading times....

Hope that helps

Hello Wizanda and thank you for your answer.

The idea is to include XOOPS as a part of the site and not make the XOOPS the site. But I got your explanation and as far as modifying the templates I was thinking about including the XOOPS pages into our already developed pages in a way that it was part of the code itself. In other words I would strip out header and footer of the XOOPS site and include it as part of our own site.

All the best,

Rom Pereira

Hello,

Also I do not want to get into SMARTY templates as our main structure. One of the main requests of our costumer is that the main site to be edited in dreamweaver and although I consider SMARTY a wonderful tool it is not very dreamweaver friendly. That is the main reason for not making XOOPS the site itself.

After a lots of years developig using templates and database driven content I came to learn that the user of the site is the one that really need all the functionality built for. Usually we as developers try out best to join both creating web interfaces and so on, but nothing beat the easy usage and facility of well known tools like openoffice, M$ office and Adobe Dreamweaver, between others.

This is just my opinion and the way I lead my projects. Please do not get mad with me :)

Thank you and all the best,

Rom Pereira

I wouldn’t get mad with you far from it, mad with Dreamweaver for being a pile of ****...then you get all these college students coming out, saying to shops they will make them a site for “£$£$”…yet on looking at it, it is sadly missing some of the best bits needed …

I prefer Weaverslave for free (+ XOOPS own editors)....doesn’t keep trying to re-write, what I am writing…
(yes, I know I can preset Dreamweaver not to, yet it is the fact it is heavy pile of bolts with no nuts to fit things all together)

Yet anyways point being in fact the only difference between a Smarty template and Html is that Smarty does more with Html, then it can on it's own....

For instance with knowledge of some of the extra Smarty code that can be added with ease, you can add user names and many other things a lot easier then coding them by hand....(these are in place in Xoops)

I do feel lately since learning more what Smarty is, many of us think it is harder then needed…..

As in you being the web master can develop any sort of code in advance in PHP code, that can be a one word Smarty Html addition later to do complicated task, making it easier for end users in the long run….


For instance we use Article and Wiwimod as our HTML pages now and my Forum is also for any advanced web design.... as they all contain advanced wysiwyg editors being Koivi editor that can drag and drop for HTML code and FCKeditor which is like DreamWeaver with the amount of options it has, yet all online (+ we have online painting rendering better then adobe ....then if you know what you are doing in our own Zoops framework...there is already site wide Wiki folding blocks, popup and many other functions I like that are in place in the Xoops.js....

This is not to say here do it this way, yet more what I have found and how there is a lot of things possible with Xoops....as for a description I would give it in comparison to other CMS systems...
"Xoops is a web developers playground"...
As in if you know more of web design overall, you can do more in XOOPS with ease....

Its where I learned all I know

also you can see this site rank in google.

Quote:
it is unbelievable for a site!
what is your domain?

Hello Wizanda and thanks again for your comments.

I trully agree with you, Dreamweaver is a tool full of bugs.

I also trully believe that a website should be, in total, fully editable by any user without any knowledge of programming. It is a shame that most efforts for web developing now-a-days is for better user interaction with the browser and the backend coding, but in the end becomes rather complicated to do anything related to web development for the non-developer. The backend integration should be transparent to the user and I am sure that this is one of the goals of projects like xoops. But we know that it is not that simple and if the user tries to do anything out of the ordinary it is a pain to do it...

Regarding smarty you are correct. It is an excellent tool. The problem in our case is that:

1) there is a need to easily identify problems and bugs. Includes based structure tend to be very difficult to debug, specially when one template does a lot of things. So we want to simplify it, one file for each main part of the site - you may say that we could use one template for each part - but that is not what we want. Those templates would be full of includes and the debugging problem would be back again.

2) not only the content will be added by users, but banners, ad functionality and so on and those needs to be easily viewable in a WYSIWYG kind of tool (you may tell me to use the blocks functionality but again a lot of problems can come from that like incompatibilities and so on).

Also, we want to have freedom to easily change from one tool to another if needed and basing the whole development in a tool like XOOPS would give us a lot of work again to move the content around. We want the functionality of XOOPS to be part of the site and we want it to be in a way that we can easilly turn it of f if we decide so.

Portability, easyness of visualisation of the rendered code, true integration between the backend developers, the content publishers and the management is the key for the success of this site. That is the reason Adobe Dreamweaver was selected as the main way to integrate so distant worlds. I know it is buggy and to be sincere we use zend to develop php, but that was the way decided by most and believe me all the other possibilities were presented.

Today the version 1 of our site uses smarty and many other tools and I may say to you with experience that does not fit our needs.

Thank you for your interest and comments,

Rom Pereira

Hello irmtfan and thank you for your interest.

Our domain is freecodesource.com and it is one of the biggest MySpace stuff provider that there is around.

In regards to your perplexity regarding the bandwidth usage, we host the images and other stuff from the layouts our users post, thus the high bandwidth usage. That is 2/3 of the usage.

Thank you and all the best,

Rom Pereira

I'd like to help with your enquiries, but I must admit that I am at a loss as to what you expect XOOPS to be and how you are thinking about using it.

As I read it (and I may be wrong - just so that you understand how I perceive it) you want to use XOOPS, but not the XOOPS theme and not Smarty templates. You also want to have a specific method of inputting content, so what's left? I have trouble seeing exactly why you are even considering XOOPS (very happy that you do, of course, but puzzled) as I would assume that there are other frameworks out there, that are more suitable for you - frameworks that do not deal with output, for example, but only with giving developers backend functionality such as DB access, file uploading, user management, etc. on which you can build.

I'm intrigued

amazing!
you are always welcome