Hello everybody!

I’m a student of Industrial Engineering and Computer Science at the University Kaiserslautern / Germany. Next week on 14. January I have to hold a proseminar about XOOPS.
The documentations, articles and forum weren’t able to answer all my questions, so I hope you do or eventually you know someone how does.
Ok, here we go…

What exactly was the reason to develop XOOPS?
So far I heard, XOOPS is mainly based on PHPNuke, so what differs XOOPS from PHPNuke, why not make just another PHPNuke version with the differences we find in XOOPS?

What exactly are the differences between XOOPS and PHPNuke?
(The topic of the proseminar, that takes place before mine is PHPNuke and in my opinion it seems to make more sense to focus stronger on the differences then on the common parts)
The User-/ and Groupmanagement is one thing I think…

What exactly is “contend” in XOOPS?
Only text, text and graphics,…?

How do the interface between Database and XOOPS-GUI work?
What must be initialised to get data out of the Database in data-templates to structure them and in theme-templates to format them, when and how does this happen?

What is the correct pronunciation of XOOPS?
One Word ? X oops ? single letters X O O P S ?…


That's it… I think…
Thank you…

(oh… I think I have to improve my English during me studies)

I'll try and answer some of your questions

Q: "What exactly was the reason to develop XOOPS?"
A: I don't know really, since I've only been with XOOPS for about 6-7 months, but I assume that people (Onakazu) was unhappy with the PHPNuke and lack of good support so he went out and made his own thing.

Q: "What exactly is “contend” in XOOPS?"
A: Content? Contents of XOOPS can be anything presentable through PHP and HTML

Q: "How do the interface between Database and XOOPS-GUI work?"
A: In the inner-most parts of XOOPS (and the modules) lie the classes. They are just like classes in any other object-oriented programming language and define class attributes and functions. Usually database interaction is handled in the classes.

A page is displayed through the following procedure:
a PHP page is requested just like any other Internet page.
The page includes some basic authentication and other files before retrieving data from the classes and manipulating it to fit the page.
The various variables and values retrieved are passed to the SMARTY template object along with a specification of which template to show.
Finally, the SMARTY template object compiles the template and fills in the areas of special SMARTY tags in the template with values from the SMARTY object and finally displays the page.

So the pattern is very much like the well-known MVC-model with the exception that the template really does not "know" anything about or interacts with the model. Everything shown in the template is given in the intermediate PHP page.

Q: "What is the correct pronunciation of XOOPS?"
A: However you pronounce it
There is no (AFAIK) "correct" way to pronounce XOOPS. Some say "eksoops", some say "ksoops"... personally I switch between them or give up and say "The open source CMS, I'm working with"

Hope I've been of help to you.

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LOL, I've always pronouced it "Zoops", and just realized I'm way off.

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don't feel bad, you're not alone on this ;). But well, I'll continue to pronounce it as "Zoops" also.

OK, as XOOPS COre Team Leader, I think I should be able to answer a few of these questions.
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The XOOPS project was at first called the myPHPNuke SE project, which was a sub project of the original MPN project. The reason we had to make it another project (as SE) was that the core was rewritten considerably to support the plug-n-play feature of modules (the original MPN was also calling some parts as modules, but they were in fact tightly integrated to the core), and that it was not very easy for us to make SE backward compatible with the original version.

At first, there were only 4 members in the SE team, which were Wanderer (tw.xoops.org webmaster), goghs, Xend and Onokazu. Wanderer, goghs and Onokazu were also the core members of the original MPN team. I am not sure exactly how they got into the project, but I think wanderer joined around MPN 1.5 as t-chinese translator, goghs (1.7) and Onokazu (just before the release of 1.8) as module devs. Xend were not in the MPN team, but he had contributed a lot by creating dozens of themes for MPN including the official theme for myphpnuke.com.
The main reason was the Object Oriented Programming aspect, that warrented a new project called XOOPS (the OO features in the name).

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I'm not sure I understand your question. XOOPS is a full Dynamic Web Content Management System. It handles all kinds of content, and the types and manner of handling is ectended by the modules.

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Wow, now theres an easy question... Basically, XOOPS has an advanced kernel that takes care of most of the data handling. Modules use the handler classes to fetch and put data in the database.
XOOPS uses the Smarty Template Engine (smarty.php.net) to present the data. Smarty is easy because it's in full development, rapidly becoming a standard, and has tags for handling dynamic data, while the static data (eg the presentation layer) is standard XHTML.

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The correct pronounciation is Zups


Herko

So it does start with a z...

Cool...

First, thank you for your quick response… you helped and help me a lot with that…

Now I have some further questions…

Concerning the historyof XOOPS: I surfed around a little bit on the MPN-Page and in their docs they mention MyOOPS, is this, what we today call XOOPS?

Why does XOOPS only support MySQL as database?

Is there a XOOPS-Font available?
(for the design of my presentation)

Are any statistics about XOOPS available?
How many installed System?
Big Sites that use XOOPS...