I'm installing XOOPS for the first time and mucking about to see how it works. Generally very favorable opinion despite the odd frustration. However, I have some questions (please answer bearing in mind I am a user, technically more or less literate, but not knowing PHP). So here goes:

1) Is there any user documentation (ie how to do things, not how to program or use XOOPS APIs). I can't find any on the site, other than the Wiki. Perhaps this is it?

2) Languages: is it possible to have multiple languages on the same site and flip between them? Either for admin access, or for viewing content, or for both? Or if I install one language, will it wipe out the previous one?

3) Languages: When I enter Russian script in the XOOPS editor, it gets converted to HTML special characters like "&1122" etc. I fear this will not show up properly in search engines. Is there a setting I can use to prevent this (eg like setting MySQL to work with Unicode?)?

4) Is it possible to remove the "Login" box from the top page, and put it on another page with a different URL (eg $xoops_url/adminlogin.php) so that anonymous users don't see that there is the possibility to login?

5) Is there a list somewhere of all the XOOPS variables and "commands" that I could use in custom blocks and templates?

I'm sure there's more - but that's all for now folks! And thanx again for your help.

Short version:
1) Nope
2) Yup
3) Dunno
4) Yup
5) Don't think so (could use one, too)

Long version:
1) Documentation is not very detailed. So far, we have the wiki... people are on the task of documenting XOOPS, but it's a big task

2) Content is a bit hard to do. I think someone managed to get some modules working with multi-langual contents. If you just want the menu items and other things, which are the same every time you open the page, then it's just a matter of language constants. Check the language/[english/german/russian] folder to see, what is there and what isn't

3) I'm not familiar with Russian characters

4) In System Admin -> Blocks, you can set exactly where the login box is or isn't shown. Keep in mind, though, that XOOPS is "meant" to be a an open system, where login is easy etc. so the basic idea is to have the login block on the front page. But it's up to you of course.

5) I've found some things around on the forums. I'd say that the items in the system preferences can be accessed on all pages. Things such as server timezone, root URL, Site name etc. can be found on all pages. Apart from that, I think you'll need to be more specific to get an answer you can use regarding functions to use
A list of variables would deffo be useful.

GL with XOOPS

For multilingo you can look on this pages :
https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?forum=14&post_id=43677&topic_id=10734
I use 2 languages : english and dutch
It works fine now except for some drop down menus and for instance a module like xtremguestbook.
Because multilingo is not a standard and some modules are 'imported/translated' from 'outside' you have to do a lot of trial/error work.
But then :
1) There are no errors, only feedback
2) Learning is fun

Aloha

Thanks for the answer, but could I have some more detail on the following points:

1) Documentation: good luck to those working on it
2) I've seen the "multi lingual hack" and might try using it, but I'ms still confused about how to install a language. Will installing one language wipe out another or can several languages live happily side by side?
3) Thanks to colleagues on the XOOPS Russian site, I found out how to fix this by modifying global.php and setting the code page to UTF-8
4) I would REALLY APPRECIATE some help on how to determine where blocks are or are not shown. I don't understand the "visible in" parameter at all. I can either show things in "top page" or "all pages" or... what?
5) A list would be useful but for the moment I will try to avoid lots oc customisation...

Thanks to all, Joelg

1) thank you
2) you can install each language separately. The core has the languages/yourlang folders (eg. languages/english/, languages/french/ etc.) and the modules have their own language folders (eg. modules/news/language/english/). Each language folder contains files with language definitions and defines. Thus, you can edit your own language files yourself. If you're about to do some heavy editing however, I'd recommend creating a new language folder for your site (eg. languages/xoops.org/, and put your own edited files in that folder. As soon as you create that foilder, you can select it from the language selection box in your site's preferences admin. Remember to create the same folder in all your modules' language folders as well, and put all the language files in that folder. The advantage of tis is that when you update a module, your own edits don't get overwritten by the default ones. Downside is that with every update you have to compare the language files for additions.
3) great work Care to share with us?
4) Block are shown on the mainpage (the startpage and where the home button refers to). This can be a module page, if you set a module as startng page. All pages is -well, all pages. Then there is the module pages themself. You can show a block on every page in a single module. For instance, show an announcement on how to use the forums on every forum page by creating the announcement block and set it to show on the forum module pages. But beware: you have to give the user groups access to the blocks as well. It may be that your confusion comes from blocks not showing up on the page you selected it to show, that may be due to the block access rights not being properly set in the groups admin.
5) a list? of what? or a mailinglist? We have the forums, so everyone can learn from each others mistakes and solutions

Herko

On point (3) - displaying text in Russian (or indeed any other single-byte language), in such a way that it does not get converted into HTML ampersands (which I feel sure won't get found in the search engines, though this is just gut reaction on my part), I'm very happy to have something to contribute. Credit though goes to Alexandere Vasic aka Alexxus <eccelsiore@gmx.net> of xoops.ru for the solution. It is this:

see global.php in root/languages/english

use (on the end of file)

define('_CHARSET', 'windows-1251');
define('_LANGCODE', 'ru');
define("XOOPS_USE_MULTIBYTES", "0");

Windows-1251 is the Windows version of Cyrillic, but I decided to use UTF-8 instead, since I reckoned that this would allow for all the German characters that I also need, whereas Windows-1251 only allows (I think) for US Ascii plus Cyrillic. At the moment, it seems to work

On point (4), my difficulty is that I have decided to use wf-sections for managing the articles on the site, but there are a certain number of "static" pages (contact us, publication prices, stuff like that), where ideally I just want to put in some HTML written up on OpenOffice, and be able to reach it from the main menu. To me, this means that I should be able to simply add a custom block, then add a reference to the custom block in the main menu. The custom block won't appear unless I click on the reference in the menu. In fact I want something that looks like the menu on www.xoops.org!! It seems a simple thing to want, but there doesn't appear to be any way of doing that, and I'm beginning to think I need to load another module somewhere to make it work. But which one?

On (5), I meant a list of callable functions in the templates.

thanks for the contrib

On point 4: this site uses a simple wrapping method to make these pages apprear xoopsed, but they are actually nothing more then php files with header and footer calls in them.

Catzwolf and Hsalazar have written a nifty modules that lets you create static pages on the fly. It's called WF-Channels and you can see it in action onhttp://wfsections.xoops2.com. It's not yet available for download, but it will be soon.

Herko