World of Xoops (WOX): World of XOOPS Newsletter, edition 2
Posted by: HerkoOn 2004/3/11 14:30:00 22181 readsIn this issue: 1. Herko's Word 2. Site of the Month: fyn.dk 3. YAXS - New Sites Using Xoops2! 4. New Modules 5. New Themes 6. New Hacks 7. Calling all Module Developers! 8. Giving back to the Community 9. XOOPS Tip of the Month 1. Herko's Word It falls to me as XOOPS Core Team Leader to report to you what we have been up to in the past month. The most important event was that myself and two of the core developers -Bunny and Skalpa- met up at the FOSDEM event in Brussels at the end of February. There we discussed and plotted out the future development of the XOOPS system. With the change of Core Development leadership from Onokazu to Bunny, the XOOPS project merged with the Zang project (see the comments of WOX nr. 1). This meant that the future development of the XOOPS system needed to be redevised, bringing with it the ideas and development of the Zang project. The meeting in Brussels focussed on this future development of the core system. The next step in XOOPS development is one big step away from the old *nuke heritage and legacy. Thus, the core development team will start working on a new XOOPS3 system. This system will be an advanced version of XOOPS2, and will be based on a new architecture, and will combine new ideas with XOOPS2 and Zang code, making it more flexible, versatile, stable and like nothing you have ever seen before (unless you have seen the perfect CMS). In developing XOOPS3, the developers will take into account the wish-lists of the community. But this does not mean that we have left the XOOPS2 system to die. On the contrary. We have made a list of features that can and will be added to the XOOPS2 core, without having to change the system too much too deep, giving you the opportunity to fine-tune your XOOPS sites and modules. We're also starting a module development forge of our own, where module developers can meet eachother and share their knowledge and ideas. Also, we invite the developer community to report bugs and submit hacks to the core development project on SourceForge.net, thus helping our developers to improve the system core. The hacks and bugfixes and reports will be reviewed and implemented if possible and appropriate. So XOOPS's development is coming into an exciting phase where everything is open and possible, as well as the XOOPS2 development becoming more open and public. Stay tuned for more reports and information about the future development in later newsletters! Herko 2. Site of the Month: fyn.dk This month's Website of the Month is the Danish http://www.fyn.dk website. I talked with the lead developer for the portal, Michael Wulff Nielsen, and asked him to introduce himself and his team to the community. Michael: My name is Michael Wulff Nielsen (Nick: naish), I am 26 years old and I live in Denmark. I am part of a 3 man team that works fulltime on building websites using XOOPS. The other team members are Jannik (Nick: bitkid) and Rene (Nick: izzlazz). Herko: You have your own company? Or is it part of a bigger enterprise? Michael: No, I am employed by Fyens Stiftstidende A/S (http://www.fyens.dk), Jannik and Rene are employed by Portal Fyn Aps (http://www.fyn.dk). Though Portal Fyn is partially owned by Fyens Stiftstidende. It's a long and complex story ;) Herko: I see. You recently delivered the portal website for the Danish Fyn region. Can you tell us about that site? Michael: Sure, Portal Fyn (http://www.fyn.dk) is an attempt to collect all local/regional information there is about Fyn (region in Denmark) on one website. We are using XOOPS2 as a basic platform and adapted it for our purposes. We have built a few custom modules which we plan to release in the near future. Herko: Why did you choose XOOPS2 as platform? Michael: Several reasons. But first and foremost was the fact that the XOOPS core code seemed relatively stable and well written. Since we never planned on using that many XOOPS standard modules we didn't even look at them. We wanted a flexible core that would provide the most basic forms of functionality e.g. - User management. - Advanced theming system - Cache solution - Adaptability Now 6 months later we can look back and say that as a platform XOOPS wasn't such a bad choice after all. We found some areas lacking, blocks management most noticably, but overall we are very pleased with our choice. What has disappointed us, is the basic modules. Some of them are not using templates everywhere (e.g. newbb), this is a big showstopper when you need to adapt the forum to a new look. Herko: What can you tell us about the custom modules you have developed for this site? Michael: Okay, here is a short list of the modules we have developed. - fsArticle, an advanced article module that is fully templatized and extremely flexible. Think wfSections, just much more advanced (and complicated I might add). - WebYellowPages, an expandable "Yellow Pages" module built specifically for danish purposes. - fynMenu, a tool for building "Tigra Menu" drop down menus and much more - Databender, a module designed to pull headlines and newsitems from other sites. This uses a perl backend. Outside of modules we have built a WYSIWYG-editor for XOOPS, based on HTMLArea. This works on both Mozilla and IE and is a drop-in replacement. Herko: Will all these modules and 'drop-ins' be released to the community? Michael: Yes, most of them. We have already provided the core XOOPS team with some of these modules for evaluation. We do not plan to generally release our YellowPages module as it is worthless without a database that costs about $30000. Should anyone however want the code for it we will gladly provide it anyway, but it really is quite useless on it's own. The fsArticle module is the first one scheduled for release, however in it's current form it requires a patch to the XOOPS core in order to function fully. Also we have no default templates for the module. I can't give any specific release date since I don't know when our development plan gives us a few days of spare time for polish work. I hope that it will be real soon now. We are currently debating whether to release the module as-is or polish it first. As for the other modules we will release them when we find time. Something that is in very short supply. If somebody is very eager to lay their hands on our modules they can send me a private message via XOOPS.org and I will mail them the appropriate code. But the code CAN AND WILL BREAK your xoops site. So everybody has been warned now. If you wish to see the modules in action you just have to go to http://www.fyn.dk and enjoy. Herko: Thank you and we hope to hear from you and your team a lot more
![](https://xoops.org/uploads/smil3dbd4d6422f04.gif)