XOOPS: The wait for XOOPS Version 2 is almost over....

Posted by: BoobtoobOn 2003/1/13 16:20:14 7888 reads
In order to make XOOPS 2 the best release to date, the XOOPS team has decided to release a public beta. Since this is a BETA, the core team will not be able to diligently answer all your questions in the XOOPS 2 forums and the only availability of this code will be through the Sourceforge CVS. If you don't know how to use CVS, please ask other XOOPS users for help or read the instructions provided with the link. Please remember, the core team will not have the time to answer any and all questions, we need to remain focused on getting the core functionally as complete and as close to bug free as possible.

With that in mind, the XOOPS team would like to point out some other subtleties of the new XOOPS 2 besides all the new features we reported in the past. If you need to figure out what we've done, please use the search feature on XOOPS.org to do a little research before asking questions.

To start, in order to keep the XOOPS product true to its GPL roots and to keep the code from being hijacked again, XOOPS will continue to use the standard GPL while incorporating Copyright notices in order to provide better protective measures code comments and credits. The GPL has withstood many attacks in the past but is still not as highly regarded and as feared within the industry as Copyright laws which are honored internationally. We are putting Copyright notices into all the core code and modules outlining our Copyright policy so that there is no confusion.

What this means to you is that any work you contribute in the form of credits (to yourself) or comments outlining your contributions must remain fully in tact. This will also help protect the work of other authors products that we use such as the Smarty Templating system and module owners. With the copyright laws backing us up, we can help everyone involved in this protect their works by (hopefully) putting an end to stripping comments out of code and replacing them with non GPL compliant replacements.

Some of the other goodies we're throwing in at the last minute (within certain modules) is the ability to moderate comments and the approval of submissions without approvers (i.e. downloads). While this does not touch on all the requested features from the past, it gets us a little closer. We will also be opening up a documentation site hopefully with the official release of XOOPS2. Please do not ask for doc at this time. We will be addressing this for XOOPS 2 since we feel the core is getting stable enough to start this endeavor.

Again, if you have an XOOPS 2 related question, please be diligent about doing some research (using the search features) to try to locate an answer to your question before posting. If you can't find one, please use the appropriate XOOPS 2 forums to post your questions and hopefully another XOOPS 2 user can help you.

One last tidbit. Please don't use XOOPS 2 for a production site, it's a beta. If you use this product on a production site, your on your own. Also, we will not be providing an upgrade script until we feel the time is appropriate. The reason for this is that from some very non scientific research using Google, our best guess is that we have between 89-179k sites utilizing XOOPS (imagine the chaos!).


Best of luck!
The XOOPS Team