Hi,
I decided to use XOOPS as a backend for the site of Dance and Song Ensemble of Warsaw Technical University, because maintaining it and regular updates started to be really time-consuming - please have a look at: http://www.zpit.pw.edu.pl/v1/main.shtml (still static-html version! What you can see on the page are: upcoming concerts, general news and gallery
).

The portal look and feel should remain, more or less, the same. So should the content.
So far I see I must write a custom block to display only short part of news from selected category - could you suggest me how to do it?
Also the main menu should be rendered differently on the top of the page, and at the bottom.

Now, there's a big question if I had done a right choice - first of all XOOPS templating/themeing could be more flexible (have you tried WebGUI from http://www.plainblack.com? It gives nearly unlimited possibilities...) - correct me if'm wrong but content can only be arranged in three-column layout, and basically all the sites look nearly the same.

What if I need that main menu on the top and bottom? Of course I can hard-code it inside theme.html but that's not the point.

Xoops would be really nice enhancement, especially after applying content-language-hack, and its capabilities.

big thanks for any suggestions and comments
Rafal

What XOOPS provides is a very powerful and flexible backend. The reason a lot of sites look very much the same is because a lot of users are happy with it that way.

With a little imagination, and a bit of time, you CAN create a totally unique look and feel for your site. Of course, you'll need to hand-code in theme.html, but if it was any more simple, you'd be lacking in power.

I'd be surprised if you could point me to a site which doesn't use one of two or three basic design concepts. Either menu top and bottom, menu left, menu right etc. The three column display isn't particularly strick with XOOPS either... you can for example set your right hand blocks to display on the left, giving you a two column display.

All you have to do is work a little.