This is to help us all find out why and what peoples goals are here…to make XOOPS overall more systematically organized, by allowing us to see who and where people are heading in their own life’s first… With many of us sort of knowing some of peoples backgrounds, it gives insight into what the person is likely to be cable of… With this being further discussed as to where and how much time people have it will hopefully streamline system organization and prepare us to be a cooperative more that functions and acts as one unit with each knowing what they can do to help and where….

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My own goal is no private motive, other then open source and freedom of ideas within artistic beliefs; that all should be at one and to make this world a better place, for the children to come. So I am online making friends and individuals who believe and have faith to see better world first. So in doing what ever I can in XOOPS and online, hopefully one day people might notice us…in the mean time we write help and fix what we see…. Anyways that is me and why I am here…so any help within XOOPS to:

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• 1) make it a systematically Zen organized system that is intuitive easy to follow and minimalist to begin, unless needed.
• 2) to help open peoples eyes to each other and create and give to a growing community of peoples whom wish to help others before greed.
• 3) to develop and maintain a repository that has no w3c errors in it that is systematically checked by a said team appointed to it… and to relate all of the repository info to the development correctly.
• 4) To help and write articles for a systematic XOOPS wiki to begin with that allows us all to work with said plan we need! To achieve this….! ( without this again we are left with others doing things we feel and know also…with a good wiki we can add the missing = no countless forum repeats. in long run reduces server calls of XOOPS org, as less modules would be required if done well…as sorry to smartfactory, yet if we had a wiki with question and answers done then it would be more intuitive; smartfaq’s is excellent; newbies are not!)
• 5) Help and maintain a cutting edge graphic style above the rest and with more added features that others CMS’s can’t do…and won’t, like folding blocks system…and XOOPS being used as its own 3d folding world. which is very easy to do already…

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Anyways these are some of the things me personally we would like to see happen overall, yet if we don’t organize our self as a global whole a little more we won’t get there very quickly…. Anyways this is me and my goals in Xoops, what are yours?

I applaud your initiative, wizanda. I like your approach as well. Instead of discussing what is wrong with XOOPS, discussing what goals we would like to see come to fruition and what we can do to aide in the process.

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My goal in using XOOPS and in my contribution to XOOPS is two-fold. 1. To contribute to a solid platform that is simple to impliment, simple to administer, yet extensible enough to scale to enterprise level applications, both for my personal sites as well as my client sites. 2. To give something back to the project that has enabled me to express myself artistically, has provided a suplimental income through client deployments and custom design, and has provided an extensive amount of knowledge and experience that has aided me in my goals to become a programmer.

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What I would like to see come to pass through this project and what I am able to do to assist in those goals are as follows... Goal: Increased awareness of the full benefits of deploying XOOPS as a solution in both the public and private sector. My Action: Continue to write articles and Blog posts highlighting the benefits of XOOPS and how to get the most out of using XOOPS for a web development platform. Continue to work towards developing high profile sites that target the primary user-base XOOPS seeks to attract and that serves as a live example of the scalability and stability of XOOPS. Goal: Improved reputation with regards to standards compliance, visual appeal, and flexibility of layout. My Action: Continue to design free themes that are W3C compliant, visually appealing, and highly customizable. To provide live examples of "out of the box" designs that challenge other designers to think outside the "blocks". Goal: To improve the reputation of the support that can be obtained through the xoops.org forums and to reduce the in-fighting and flame wars that continually tarnish this project's reputation in the public eye. My Action: Answer questions wherever possible instead of "letting someone else do it". Continue to serve as forum moderator and act promptly, wherever possible, to contain and/or difuse discussions that do not follow the established guidelines of XOOPSiquette.

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I have many thoughts on goals I think should be goals, however, I will not comment on areas where I cannot contribute, and I feel it would be wise if we all take that stance. Long Live XOOPS! Best Regards, James

My goals are
1. To give back to XOOPS because of what XOOPS gave me. I had loads of documents relating to my personal interest on hosted sites that pulled the pin - I got to the point of trusting no-one and deciding to try and build a website I own. I now have those docs back out there for use by painters. I could not have done this without the XOOPS cms, and the wonderful support I got as someone who had no idea what php, sql etc was when I started.

2. Continue to assist as a moderator, targetting the new users in particular. I don't post answers to questions about things I still don't understand myself but I do point people to where I think the information is if I can because I read almost every post. I believe in demonstrating the 'tools' available for finiding answers to questions, especially those asked and answered before. So, if you don't get a direct answer from me this is partly why...get the skills to DIY and the XOOPS journey is much more satisfying.

3. Continue to contribute to documentation as This was I believe where I struggled most as a new user, especially coming to terms with the language of creating a XOOPS website. I just wish I had more time to get more done in a hurry Of course i encourgae contributions to the documentation as well.

4. I have and will continue to make myself available to those who are writing pages, how to's or read me files english (especially when it is not their first language) and wish to have them checked for accuracy and grammar. This is how I contribute on an international level. I can't write code and don't know how to write a theme but my skills as someone who has taught people English for 20 years are available to the broad community. If you need a proof reader let me know.

5. My personal challenge in the future will be to learn to design a theme. For that I will depend on the other wonderful contributors!

it is very good forum!

I've been using XOOPS for a number of community projects and websites, and am ready to take it further for my own purposes. I've also built a couple of modules for clients (but can't release them publicly due to contracts) for websites I put together for them using XOOPS.

I'm now building an ASP capability to release to my hosting clients overall and want to use XOOPS due to its foundation and such. However, I'm running into a number of issues and then found this thread. I want XOOPS to do well because it's underlying structure has a number of overwhelming strengths including caching and overall ease of modifications.

Because of their popularity, I've also tried Joomla and Drupal recently for some other projects I'm working on. They both have great out-of-the-box (OOB) experiences because they are quite pretty and have a ready-to-go set of basic functionality (like XOOPS used to have). Further, Drupal has some interesting extensibility of their datasets and an very organic category system (but very confusing to many of my clients).

But, I think XOOPS is still the best overall.

XOOPS has many strengths:
* Excellent caching. Extremely configurable
* Lightweight server application (due to caching)
* Object-Oriented design (much easier to understand)
* Separation of presentation and functional layers
* Smarty Templates (nuf said)
* Strong Security (assuming modules are developed using XOOPS functions)
* Modules - many excellent, solid modules that provide solid functionality for many users

XOOPs however lacks a few things. I've contributed to the Module developer's guide, but we do have some stuff to tackle. I certainly want to help.

* Incomplete Documentation - user guides and such way out of date. No complete documentation on stuff
* Common Administration Interface - there are a number of modules that have begun to use a similar style for the administration area, but still need more commonality in this area including pop-up/context-sensitive help
* URL Rewriting/SEO - The easy ability to rename modules so that paths make sense to people using the site and hides the /modules/ directory.
* Directory renaming - Easy way to rename modules so that the directories make sense to people reading them.
* Custom Profiles (although SmartProfile begins to fill this void for PHP5 and over users, I've just finished porting to PHP4 and moving to profiles directory ala 2.2.x)
* Workflow - The ability for users to have/need approvers for content. So a user's posts in any module either requires approval and/or generates notification for/to approvers. So many clients ask for this. We kludge it somehow or go without and trust more.
* In-Line Glossary - where words and phrases can be highlighted for in-line content to pop-up glossary information (ala tokens in Drupal).
* Event History/Audit Log
* Cron Management - capability for modules to have cron jobs that are hooked into the system (for those that have ability to add a cron job)
* Easy ability to integrate other best-in-class PHP- and OO-based applications into XOOPS (ala xosCommerce).
* Aliases - yes, it's easy to do this manually in .htaccess file, but let's provide an even easier web interface for users to manage these.
* Old modules
* Fragmented community - the XOOPS community has become somewhat fragmented. While I'm not a high participant, I do keep an eye on things here. We need to come back together and make sure we're implementing the best-in-class modules.

Modules
* Events and Conference/Session Registration/Management Module with payment mechanism through osCommerce and/or Subscriptions (latter may work fine for most needs).
* Handbooks - easy ability to manage structured handbooks (for manuals, employee handbooks, etc.)

I won't go further on modules at this point, because I still have more research to do on some of these.

The biggest thing that we can do to make XOOPS an excellent reality is to provide an excellent OOB experience for the new user. This includes an easy installation (which XOOPS has), an excellent first template for "curbside appeal" ala looking for a house (lacking), a comprehensive set of modules that are easy to use and work similarly with well-executed templates. I know XOOPS moved away from a core set of modules, but this can be a strength. Coupled with a beautiful theme, it's the main reason Drupal and Joomla are so popular despite the fact they aren't as configurable, easy to modify, and have a major CPU impact compared to XOOPS.

I'm willing to help and looking to engage more.

Why I am here:

I needed a way to run a website for my workplace that a) didn't cost anything and that b) was simple enough to allow our staff to collaborate online. XOOPS fit perfectly, and over time has become the central platform for information sharing in my organization, and has now been adopted by several of our partners as well.

Personal goals:

Probably not as noble as those before me! I would like to be able to write my own modules and make XOOPS do things I want it to do! I've just finished reading several books on php, mysql, html and css (apache and ajax to go). So maybe by the end of the year, I'll have managed to produce something that works.

As I'm not up to coding yet, I write the occasional bit of documentation. But I'd much rather write modules :)

I started working with XOOPS when I was looking for a way to create a web site where people could post their travel stories and find links to other travel related web sites. When I discover that there were free CMS applications that could do the job I started digging into it and soon I discovered that XOOPS was the best CMS for what I planned to do. I started learning php and I fascinated with the almost endless possibilities this application provides I was soon able to write my own modules. The side effect however was that I kind of lost focus on the travel site

I have many things on my to do list for the coming XOOPS year:

*) Complete the Directory module I started working on over a year ago.
*) Create a number of XOOPS themes (I want to improve my design skills )
*) Create a transactions module for credit card payments that allows other modules to easily integrate payments.
*) Write documentation for non-technical users.

I might come up with more things but for now I think that I can keep myself busy with those items, too busy at least to work on the travel site .

I especially use it for themes too. I like to create something original, than to use something made by someone else!
So, thank you XOOPS for letting me be original!

I've made Xoops, for the most part, my CMS of choice, due to ease in which complex sites can be set up in a very rapid timeframe. For anything more complex then a single-user blog or small static web site, I use XOOPS these days.

My motive in the XOOPS community is to encourage the commercial use of XOOPS as an efficient, easily customizable and scalable web solution. I created the web site XoopsExperts.com as a new venue where businesses can quickly find XOOPS developers or technical support. I think that the more the business community adopts Xoops, the more it will grow and continue to develop. XOOPS is good for business, and business is good for Xoops! :)

Wizanda,

your name is in red on this page. community portal

That means you did not stop by and leave a note about your aims or goals or items that would be of interest to other xoopers.

If you will note there is a link to your site on the sidebar and many nice comments about your work within the pages of the recent comments and calendar area.

Would you be so kind as to post something like this at xoops-end-users.com

Thanking you ALL ...
who will help to make this a success.

BlueStocking.