I am starting on a new project for a hypnotherapy institute. I believe in the work they are doing and what they are teaching, hence the site is very dear to me and hence this post as I wish for it to be the best I can Make.
I would specify the requirements of the site and will love to get a feedback with respect to what modules I should be using for the different sections of the site and also for any other thing they ppl here feel can help.

The site will basically have two major groups namely:
1. Students
2. Teachers

and 5-6 sub groups under each group i.e. step 1, step 2, step 3……..
Since XOOPS currently does not have the option of creating sub groups there will be around 14 groups with different permissions.
A student in student step 1 group will have permission to view only matter related to step 1.
A student in student step 2 group will have permission to view only matter related to step 1 and step 2.
A student in student step3 group will have permission to view only matter related to step 1, step 2 and step 3. And so on…………

The same is applicable for teachers except all teachers have complete access to students section and group based access to teachers section.


The site will be based on XOOPS 2.3.2b since that’s the latest version.

The various sections of this site:

1. Latest News with a scrolling latest news block (with SEO)
2. Schedules (with SEO)
3. Basic Content (with SEO)
4. Forum with groups based permission
5. Videos of therapies. These videos will be private and will only be visible to people having appropriate permissions.
6. Testimonials
7. Newsletter subscription
8. Hypnotherapy scripts again permission based
9. Articles/blog section. (with SEO)
10. Picture gallery
The site needs to be as easy to operate as possible, as its day to day operations will be managed by staff with not much html knowledge.

Kindly, suggest me with the modules i should be using.

After the initial considerations, i have decided to use

Smartsection 2.13 clones for scripts and articles.
Mastop Publish for basic content with defacer module for meta data.
Cbb 3.08 for forum
News seo 1.56 for news with marquee module for scrolling title block
AMS 2.51 for testimonials
Extgallery 1.05 after its release for Picture Gallery.
piCal ).91 for schedules

Now my question is will smartsection 2.13 be maintained to work with future version of xoops. I would have used news seo instead of smartsection but there seems to be no way to clone news module.
If the chances of smartsection not being supported is high then kindly suggest an article module which is with seo capability and is cloneable.

Quote:You can clone every module. It's not very difficult, but a lot of work. See this FAQ.

Quote:

Hum, as far as I know smartsection is a deprecated module.
Not just smartsection but all other smart modules are most likely to be renamed and operate on a different framework.

But this is open source and smart modules are to good to go to waste (and when I mean good I mean GOOD, very well coded, very XOOPS at the best').
Most likely they will be renamed and the support/maintenance will be carried by anyone who dares.

So for now i am sticking with smartsection 2.13 as i love the fact that its very simple and does exactly what it is supposed to, nothing more and nothing less.

Also i will be using the user profile module to handle the registration. I need to know how do i customize the username that a person can select. Basically the site is for a hypnotherapy institute being developed for its students and teachers. Now for the students the username to be used for regisrtation should be the certificate no. for the last course they have done.

Certificates no. for all courses have a standard pattern. All certificate start with the name of the institute followed by the name of the city in which courses where conducted followed by the initials of the teachers then initials of the course followed hy the date and finally the "S.No." of the sudent.
So for emaple if the name of institute is "ABCD", city in which the course conducted is "Bombay", name of the instructor is "Nitin Shah", name of course is "step 1" date is "16-12-2008" and the serial no. of the student is "15", the certificate no. for the student will be ABCD BOM NS S1 161208 15 without spaces ie ABCDBOMNSS116120815

Now my question is that is there a way to ensure that while registration the system checks that the student has entered the username in this format say for example
the first four letter of the username are "ABCD",
the 11th and 12th letters are either s1, s2, s3, s4 or s5.

And only if the username is in this format will the registration proceed otherwise it will show an error saying username is not in the correct format.

The username is verified trough a regexp. You can define a regular expression for the allowed input and then adapt one of the three existing possibilities for the username checking or add a fourth.
This means that everyone that registers on the site has to have this kind of student form username.

Quote:

Thanks ghia.
Can anyone please also help me with what expression should i define for the above used example where the first four letters should be "ABCD" and 11th and 12th letters should be either "s1" or "s2" or "s3" or "s4" or "s5".

For the same site can someone also suggest me a simple faq module?
Alternative to smartfaq?

Also is there a video module to play flv files. The videos will be visible based on proper permissions for the groups to which the visitor belongs. Also download of video can be restricted.

I have tried smartmedia but dont see permission management for categories anywhere. Also tried xstreamer and webphoto module but same problem.

Kindly help with respect to the above three posts.