I am not sure if this is possible. What are your thoughts on useing the boox module and a little ruby?

I've tested ruby on rails, it's a different beast from PHP in some ways.
It's framework generation is a very interesting concept, unlike PHP you don't have to worry about simple CRUD operations since ruby generates them for you, same for templates.
The big drawback is that you either have to install ruby on your own server, or find a shared host that has it running since most only work with PHP or windows.
It does use some familiar concepts to us PHP programmers such as functions and classes.
Have you tried any PHP frameworks? I've been testing seagull framework. It uses a lot of concepts similar to XOOPS such as modules, permissions and templates and takes them further; for example, with Seagull you could use smarty templates or any other template engine you like since it's modular. You can divide content by module (as XOOPS does now) or by category (like drupal does) and allows multi language. XOOPS could learn a lot from Seagull, for a future version of course.