So, I've been testing a couple of CMS's for my website and have brought the finalists down to XOOPS and Mambo. I'm presently leaning towards XOOPS (v2.0.10 is the version I'm working with), but when I've been working on the setup, I've come across a couple of stumbling blocks...

Please, it's just an alpha version to see how things might roll out, and I've only put two hours into the layout and install so far -- I know it looks like hell.

I'm having trouble getting some modules to show up on the Anonymous user screen. My readership is such that I'd MUCH rather have basically everything available to everyone. Example: http://www.mykahn.com/xoops/html/ is the URL for the install, you can see that things are blank presently, but when you login with user test/test you can see that I really AM trying to put something together. I can't see a place in the documentation that tells how to move some of the modules to be everyone-viewable, and forum posts aren't shedding any light either.

RSS - I keep a blog at http://jazzmahn.livejournal.com and although they've got an iframe based embedding strategy, I think that there's bound to be an easier way. The Headlines module only seems to poll the RSS feed for the title, and I'm unclear about how to address and yank the first bit (or even all of) the text. How is this handled, and a better question; is there a hum-dinger of an RSS or Atom aggregator that will just do this?

XoopsGallery. Dated, dated, dated (and buggy). I'm thinking about running it as a stand-alone, 'cause I miss a couple of the features of 1.4+, and I'd really like to migrate to v2.0 as it comes out of beta. I don't think I'm going to run this module as a module, because of the port lag. Love Gallery itself though

phpBB2 - I have an existing install (v2.04. although it's been quiet for a while), but there doesn't seem to be a clear migration path from what I have to a module inside Xoops. I'm sure someone's done this -- any help for it? Do I just have to run it as a standalone?

Can anybody help with any of this?

1. Go to System -> Groups, modify the Anonymous Users group and give module / block access rights to everything the anonymous users should see

2. According to the HTML source for your blog, your RSS feed url is: http://jazzmahn.livejournal.com/data/rss . You may consider using xhlds instead of the bundled headlines module as it has better unicode support and deals with more feed formats (RSS2, ATOM, etc).

3. Gallery - Gstarrett works very hard on the gallery port. I'm sure he would appreciate you describing to him what problems you had with the module, so they can be addressed properly. http://www.xoopsgallery.org/

4. phpbb - I can't find them at the moment, but I thought I saw a user migration script from phpbb. In addition, BBpixel has a port of phpbb embedded in XOOPS. Be forewarned though, bbpixel's port includes modified versions of some XOOPS core files (namely login / user management). So you must wait for bbpixel to update his port when new versions of XOOPS are released.