I've recently taken over a site built with Joomla, and all I can say is that I bloody well hate it. With a passion.

Unfortunately, I can't rebuild it with someone else, and to make matters worse, I'm now having to write a plugin.

It does have some nice features, but gnnn...

I've tried Joomla few days ago after few years.

The few things that I favor is out-the-box SEO url rewrite, and easy and ftpless module and plugin instalation.

Also, there are very nice comment modules that XOOPS lack. I still thing that XOOPS could not be treated as professional CMS without good comment module or core feature.

XOOPS' lack of URL rewriting/SEO URLs is a major stumbling block for it to be honest.

Without spending hours checking, I believe XOOPS (and its clones) is the *only* CMS without this feature. It seriously means that I cannot use it in a commercial environment. At least not without hours of work hacking about with code.

It doesn't seem like much, but it's that one feature that is letting it down, and people expect this with their sites these days.

However, as for URL rewriting in Joomla - it is there, but it is still at times hit and miss. Even in some articles, it might just display the article ID and not the stub/alias. Then if you set up a menu link to an article, the current rewritten link breaks, and vice versa.

I've not tried any comment modules in Joomla, so I don't know how they compare - but again, I don't think there's anything wrong with the comment system in XOOPS, which seems to work well.

Yup, the XOOPS comment system works well, but - only if you're registered as user, or you wanna be anonimous.

There is no option for nonregistered users to enter their nickname (and url, email etc..) and post comment.

For example, if I wanna start a blog with Xoops, there are many content modules, but if someone want to leave me a comment, he/she must register or post as anonimous. It's not the way for private homepages/blog to make your visitors to register to post. It's stupid. :)

Regarding allowing names for unregistered comments, is it on the official feature request list? It seems that shouldn't be that big of an issue to add.

Regarding, the URL rewrite, is that on the list? I guess that significantly more complicated though...

What would really be cool is if XOOPS had an option to turn on modRewrite and have a pre .htaccess file setup to be used if this was turned on. From what I understand so far about Joomla Modules, the developer would need to create an encoder and decoder of the query string to it could be converted to a friendly url. That will take some work from core developers as well as module developers unless XOOPS Core had another field parameter to store a name specified by the user in the modules section and XOOPS somehow could use that to create friendly urls. But this is just a simplified observation. It more complicated then that when you get into the details. :)

There is a XOOPS module URL rewrite solution called xoRewriteModule, and it works pretty well and is relatively easy to install, but isn't necessarily for the PHP application newbie.

It should be integrated into XOOPS at some point, I think but a management interface would have to be built for it among other things. Caveats apply of course.

And, yeah, I've played with Drupal and Joomla (and its predecessor Mambo) among several others and when it comes to making real customization changes, and managing a set of sites overall, I've felt that XOOPS rocks and focuses on the functional details we need to be able to rely upon. Drupal and Joomla have good OOB, but I wouldn't want to have to keep up with the aggressive Drupal migration path either.

And the XOOPS comments system works well, too, except for those appropriate modules that didn't bother to add them (why I don't know). Better templates for the comments sections would be a great update, but every site I know has a different idea what that means, thus the Smarty presentation layer to make those changes easier. I like the bubble version, personally.

But, whatever works. Hope the URL rewrite info helps although it doesn't automatically give SEO-friendly URLs. But there remains debate as to how well that actually works, too.

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this is so true...i have tried Joomla and drupal...and i still think XOOPS is still the best

I have been using Joomla 1.0, 1.5.x versions and have not found a component/module yet for mass-email.

I tried the component "Qvarnis Mass Mail" and it also fails.

But XOOPS had an easy system and worked like a champ to send emails to the group from backed.

Like this there is lot of features in XOOPS I like.