Welcome to the group. It's good to see fresh faces that can bring new questions and idea to the table.
I'll list a couple of my sites for you here so you can see more. I have others, but they are non-production sites for testing purposes. They're not as robust as those listed by Herko, but it will show you the different things you can achieve.
StewdioNet is my first XOOPS installation. It's not quite like other XOOPS sites because it's meant for my own personal thing(s) and registration is by invitation or request only for people that are into the same thing as me. It's rather simple and straight forward with autoupdating news to keep it looking fresh.
FamilyNet is one of my latest installations and is going to be quite different then my main. Firstly, it's a gift to the family for christmas, so it's largely unfinished with duplicate modules for testing reasons, empty forums and other areas. Ultimately, this site will be like other XOOPS sites, in that it's users will be the ones who create the content by uploading pictures and participating in the forums and other such things that I plan on doing.
The difference between the first site and second respectively, is tha the first is more or less static where only me and a couple of others add things once in a while. In all honesty, it's not much of a site.
The second site is community driven, aimed at getting the members to invite other people to participate making the site grow all by itself with little need for me to intervene with the exception of administrative tasks and updates.
As you can tell from these two examples, you can customise the look, feel and functionality of your site with some planning and little experience. The more you work with Xoops, the more you learn and understand the many things it can do.
Xoops is most likely the easiest system I have used to date, and I have tried most of them out there. Every new update or addition to any of my sites reveals something new to learn and the rewards to these challenges have been nothing short of pure pleasure.
Don't worry if your not familiar with PHP, SQL, Smarty Templates and all the rest. In no time at all, through working with the system, you will get a stronger feel for how things work and ultimately learn these powerful tools and languages. You will find that by comparison, XOOPS is one of the easiest, most modular system to date. (Although I'm a bit biased by now
)
Welcome aboard and Happy Xoops'ing!
Cheers!
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Tip:
Remember, keeping it simple and clean will make your visitors stay longer and come back for more. Making changes to your site will be more noticeable if you follow these two simple rules.