A lot of preparation has gone into the roadmap and design of the new system. This development project is lead by Skalpa, who did most -if not nearly all- the hard preparatory work.

The system will be called XOOPS 4, in order to mark the huge step forward the system makes. It has very little to do with the current system, but will be backwards compatible with the XOOPS 2.2 (and perhaps beyond) version that is now in active development. This way we ensure that XOOPS can benefit fully from the new architecture, while keeping the current userbase.

Across the years, the XOOPS core has evolved to become more than just a portal script. Hovever as of today it cannot be seen as a real Content Management System neither as an applications framework, while in the meantime it is a bit of all of this. For this reason, people have become unable to define what was XOOPS, and it was the first problem we had to solve before trying to go anywhere.

So we first tried to design a global architecture that could be able to integrate all the required components we could already imagine. The objective here was not to list all these components or to detail their individual implementation, but to give an overall unrestrictive structure to our future system mainly describing how its composing parts will relate to each others, giving a precise place to each of them.

Once its first layers implemented, starting from the lowest ones, this global architecture will be enhanced, detailed, grow to include new classes and frameworks until we reach our final objective: have a platform that will allow us to run and maintain all the xoops.org web sites as we would like them to be (while they are actually too much built around XOOPS and its limitations).

Have fun reading the whole roadmap, and keep your eyes open for more news!