Hi all,

I run a small LAN center in Louisville, KY, and I'm currently looking for a replacement for my current system (which consists of a bunch of unrelated stuff held together with sweat and tears), in favor of something that has more integrated features to replace my hodgepodge of stuff, and community features out of the box.

I downloaded XOOPS 2.0.15 the other day and have been playing around with it and downloading modules. Thus far, I like what I see as far as the community features go, and the module selection looks outstanding, but I'm still looking for a few things, wondering if ya'll could answer or point me in the right direction for some answers...

1. A module that can display a catalog of games we have in the center. Box shots, play images, descriptions, esrb ratings, user ratings, comments, and e-commerce hooks (links to Amazon for now, on-site store later) are all important to me here. Nice to haves would be links to upcoming events associated with a game, categorization (i.e. PC versus console, FPS versus RPG), and views by category. Something like the downloads module, but without the downloads...

2. Integration with a recent version of phpbb. I'd be happy with just user account and password syncronization (logging into XOOPS logs you into phpbb and vice-versa). I notice there is a module (X-phpBB) but it appears to no longer be supported. Is there an alternative here?

2a. Barring that, how about the ability to import user info from my existing phpbb into XOOPS. I have 200 users and I don't want to ask them to create accounts all over again.

3. An event calendar that does not suck. I'm currently using phpiCalendar. I really like the layout, but I find the need to update the calendars in a separate app, coupled with the fact that WebDAV does not work correctly on my web server to be a pain. I found the xCal module, but it seems to wrap a seriously outdated version of phpiCalendar... and it seems to be *really* slow.

3a. The ability for users to register for upcoming events on the web site, preferably via a link from the calendar.

3b. Automatic "You registered for the foobar tournament, which is tomorrow" reminder emails/pm's whatever. Could be 3b or 4a. Take your pick...

4. Mailing list management. Using phpList here, which is adequate, but does not integrate with the rest of my site at all. I notice that the XOOPS System module seems to have part of what I need, but I'm not seeing a way to define mailing lists, let users add/remove themselves (double opt-in preferred), and send e-mails to selected lists.

5. Cleaner URLS -- I notice that XOOPS has an unfortunate tendency to emit verbose URLs... ie /modules/news/article.php?storyid=1. Would there be a way to clean that up to something like /news.php?storyid=1? perhaps with mod_rewrite?

6. User "blog" pages... A real nice to have.

7. Easily customizable user profile fields. By this I mean static (user's AIM address or current favorite game) as well as dynamic content (game stats pulled from other servers).

I know... I'm asking for a lot. The good news is that XOOPS already crossed a bunch of stuff (SMARTY templates, banner management, partner management, polls, user management) off my list already... plus it actually works out of the box (you don't know how rare that is... I've looked at dozens of CMS/community site building systems). Just so's ya know, I don't mind getting my hands dirty writing code, I just don't want to spend weeks spelunking spaghetti code to figure out how to add a field to a form (hello phpBB, I'm looking at you).

Anyway, thanks for any advice...

badfrog

Holy smokes your asking for the world, but from what I do with xoops, your in luck.

I converted a phpbb to cbb user database (probably the hard way) by downloading the user table into excel and matching the field (those that can be matched) then nulled the other ones.

As for calendar, I use extcal. There is also pical by GIJOE.

J

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Not sure the best way to do this for you. I'd probably do a standard html page and wrap it into Xoops.

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Not sure. I moved to CBB years ago.

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Importing users is a matter of copying the data into new tables. That's how I switched from phpbb to NewBB (which is now CBB). It's tedious but definitely doable.

If I recall, my only problem here was that I had messages that were getting truncated due to length. And the BB codes didn't match up correctly at that time. This was a while back though so your mileage may vary.

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Several calendar modules exit and I think at least one does scheduling. I don't use one so I'm not sure what would suit you best or if any would suit your particular needs.

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I don't need this so I haven't paid close attention to it (and will be politely corrected if wrong), but this is one of the things I've seen many ask for but XOOPS doesn't do well. There IS a newsletter functionality in Xoops. I think it had a limit on the number of people it could send to reliably. Do some forum searches on this feature.

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Available in SmartSection (I think they call it SEO) and I know that short urls have been implemented in a variety of fashions for XOOPS over time. Forum search!

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phppp is doing a great job of integrating user blogging into Xoops. Do a search on recent module releases (within the last few weeks for the latest update).

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Sort of. This was added to XOOPS 2.2x. I'd recommend sticking with 2.0.15 since it is the most current code (despite it's numbering). 2.2x works well for many. I ran it for quite a while. But not all modules will work with it. Since you have a wide list of needs, it's safest to stick with the best supported version of Xoops.

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And in that case, XOOPS should be a joy to work with. I couldn't code my way out of a Hello World contest, but I feel semi-comfortable hacking XOOPS and modifying templates or themes.

Good luck! Hope to see you around again soon.