i heard about XOOPS around 3 years ago. i was a part of a gaming forum and they were running xoops.

I heard about XOOPS by... hell... I cant remember really... #OOPS# its been a long time.... 4-5 years ago me thinks.

I guess about 3 years ago we were trying to find a way to make our first and very ugly hand-coded html website look better. It was horrible.

We found this thing called a 'CMS' that was supposed to build websites for you. We didn't really believe it at the time (being completely new to the web at that stage), but what the hell, we set it up and took a look at it. This wasn't XOOPS, it was 'another' CMS that shall remain nameless.

We were shocked and amazed to discover that it really could automatically generate webpages (this was kind of like discovering that your dog can fly), but after a couple of weeks of experimentation, disappointed that this particular CMS wasn't very flexible, and very difficult to customise because of the way it was coded. So we went looking for others.

Then our computer guy randomly showed me the xoops.org homepage. 'Argh!' I said. 'It's ugly, why are you showing me this?'. But we installed it anyway and discovered that it was easy to use and much easier to customise.

So three years on we've distributed nearly half a million free publications via download from our site and I love XOOPS...but I still don't like the theme

Edit: Ermm...in summary, it was an accident

It was about 2 years ago, I was searching for a CMS to use and found XOOPS, which looked like everything I needed.

I had thought about using Mambo, but it seemed less "community site" friendly.

It was about 3 years ago, i was searching for a CMS to use on the website for my father. I found 'myXOOPS the german XOOPS Community. After a 1 hour all other cms where deletet from my harddisk and the one and only CMS XOOPS was right to be installed. And i never felt sorry about this decision.

Lets see....

In 2003 I started tinkering in websites and how they work.
about that same time I found CMS, Now I thought this was killer stuff. so i downloaded and basicly turned on a CMS ( it shall remain nameless ) well I got things the way I liked it and found out one day it was hacked..

it took a while to fix it but it was fixed. the next day they hacked it again. and again, and.... again.
so I started to look for another, I looked and looked, tried this one, tried that one, tried another. did find very many of them apealing.

Well my brother Inlaw cought wind of what happened. and asked me to check out a website. ( also not named ) so I did, he handed me a user name and password.
I spent a good 2-3 hours checking it out, and I liked what I seen, I asked him what did he use. he replied Xoops.

As a reply I said, no realy, Ive looked at XOOPS and tried it, its nothing like that. His responce... Ive tried many of the other CMS and by far this one has shone the most flexable easy to use and even easier to modify. and that is why you couldnt tell it was a XOOPS based site.


So it looks like I have 2.
once when i looked in my fantango box in my hosting account.

and.....or i should say....

But... My brother-Inlaw has truly shown me what XOOPS could be under instead of what it was.
It took the second chance or second look to see what XOOPS could be.

September 2006 I started coaching my eldest son's U8 football team and the clubs website is a XOOPS site.

Around the same time I was wondering what to do with a website that I keep for a social/community group. We had a separate website and Forums and I wanted something more "integrated".

1st January 2007 my first (and so far only) XOOPS site went live

Can't honestly say that I looked at the other CMS systems that much other than a quick play on opensourcecms.org; I'd more or less made up my mind at the start.

In 2001, I was tinkering with a perl script on my own domain, it was a lot of work just to ghet it going. Then I found (thru hotscripts.com) php-nuke, and installed that. It worked fine, untill I wanted to add or change something. I had to dig into the code, add hacks just to make some other thing work properly. But, it was my first introduction to open source cmses. When looking for the best way to manage a phpnuke website, I found someone talking about a new CMS called XOOPS. So, in february 2002, about 6 weeks after the launch of XOOPS 1.0 RC1, I joined and started to work with it. I've been a XOOPSer ever since

Herko

My beginning on the web didn’t start with html, as I had done a bit of that at collage, instead I realized I could spend ages learning a system and then make everything from scratch or find anyone who had already learned it and learn off them.
As I had done at collage, where most people were more interested in playing games then to look at multimedia music sites, as one of the authors was a programmer, so had made pac man etc…so I met with him borrowed his code and got a distinction.


So same applied online and went through all the different CMS I could find, many put me off in terms of scalability and looks overall, with not much knowledge back then of what was actually needed…..
So originally I started as an E-Xoopers….


Yet then notice how many times, things were filtering down from XOOPS it’s self and how much more stable everything looked with Xoops, and then decided to swap over too XOOPS and stayed ever since.

Herko...and after all that trouble I went to not to name that other CMS :)