I have a few websites and would like to combine them using one main site and the others to display the content of the main site. I know I could do this with frames on the other sites but I realy don't like frames. I would like to use XOOPS on all the sites, and need the content to be searchable. is there any module/hack currently available that would do this??

Do a search for a few modules namely:
CJay content
freecontent
wfsections
(There are others, I can't remember the names off hand)

These are you best options if you want your old material to be searchable within Xoops. If you don't care about searchablility, do what I do and use:

<?php
include("../mainfile.php");
include(XOOPS_ROOT_PATH."/header.php");
$xoopsOption['show_rblock'] = 1;
?>

The content of your original html file goes here!!

<?php
include(XOOPS_ROOT_PATH."/footer.php");
?>

Save your old files as .php and provide a link on your site. XOOPS will be wrapped around your content nice and clean without frames or <IFrames>.

Once the final release of wfsections comes out I may start outputting my stuff with that because of the extra integration with Xoops. For now, includes work for me as a quick solution.

Ok, what If I didn't want to use XOOPS on my satalite sites, but have XOOPS on my main site. On the satalite sites I would have a different header and then the main site embeded below it. It needs to be embeded as it needs to be crawled by the search engines for that domain. How would I go about that??? Anyone know how???

I know how to get the initial external content page I select to include with but then all the links contained in the XOOPS page will take me to the main XOOPS site. Is there a way to contain it so the links wont go to the external linked page but will include the linked page within the initial site page. Another possibility maybe would be to have multiple XOOPS sites all sharing the same database, would that work do you think? Problem is I wouldnt know the first thing about putting that in practice. Any help before I lose all my hair would be appreciated.

sharing tables + sticky url's
VirtualHost

To share ALL tables, but use a different url, it's easiest to use define("XOOPS_URL", "http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']); or define("XOOPS_URL", "http://".$HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_HOST']); in mainfile.php