I would like to set up a team of people to help us with creating Guidelines for XOOPS Module Development for XOOPS 2.6.0

There will be two parts to it:

1) To identify common features among XOOPS modules (e.g. Rating, Breadcrumb, editor selection, etc.), and then define the "Best Practice" for it, that could be used consistently across all modules in XOOPS 2.5.5

This will also include common module structure (i.e. which files are going to which folder, and how we name the files, e.g. file dealing with Permissions should be called "permissions.php" and should be in /admin folder, or all module tables should start with mod_ , as suggested by Alain01 here)

Right now we have too many ways of doing the same thing, and we need to provide some standardization, which will make maintenance of the modules in the future much easier!

And there are some really good ideas in some of the modules that I've seen so far, that actually should be incorporated in all of our modules.

2) Convert those features for XOOPS 2.6.0, and provide conversion guidelines for module developers, so we can have a very quick conversion of the "Basic Module Pack" to XOOPS 2.6.0.

The sooner we start, the more successful will be our XOOPS 2.6.0 release.

Couple of starting points for us:

1) XOOPS Coding standards

2) XOOPS Module Development Quality Checklist (please note that there are tabs at the bottom to different sections of the document)

If anybody is interested, please let us know.

Sure... I'll help.

1st, for modules :

- standard table name : see this post

- Images module :
-- all images will be on this directory : /modules/the-module/images
Why : for the 'template overloaded' (?) (template surcharge in french language)
much easier to customize template overloaded

- standard images name :
-- the search image name (for the module) is never with the same name (ex : search.png)
- standard button image : for homogene administration, it would be nice if the "Add new xxxx" "Add news categorie" etc were the same image in all modules?

May be a designer could work on making a lot of buttons and images, with free use, in order to have an homogene administration. When it would be ok, the module's developper should use by default this images for the administration managed.

Better : an xoops admin images 'library !!!
With this, modules could just used the images library (better for cache).

Sorry for my english.

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We have it already in XOOPS 2.5.5 the preliminary image library at:

/Frameworks/moduleclasses/icons

That was the purpose for it. The plan was to expand it to full set of icons in 16/32 sizes for all modules to use it. XOOPS 2.6.0 will change the location, but it is secondary, as long as the modules can find it. Currently we have "pathIcon16" and "pathIcon32" links to them.

I hope, in XOOPS 2.6.0 we'll be able to combine all the standard icon images as "sprites", which will make things even easier, and will provide a better performance.

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You mean "sprites", like that :

using CSS background-position property ?
Great !

Yes, I would love to see it. There are tons of article about it, like this one, and every performance tool is saying that we should combine images.

For example, we have already combined the small flags here on the Website into a sprite:

About images, I think that modules must avoid the use of language in images, I mean, images with text.

Buttons and other kind of components that require text, must be created with CSS and HTML for consistency, accessibility and standardization.

we could just have icons and generate buttons like this
http://www.red-team-design.com/just-another-awesome-css3-buttons

We have Twitter's Bootstrap included in XOOPS 2.6.0, so you can create buttons directly in Bootstrap.

See Bootstrap Buttons here

And you can include icons in the buttons as well.

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exactly what i had in mind, this will simplify things by allot and we can even just use the predefined glyphs with out the need to any media icons