In this issue: 1. Herko's Word 2. Site of the Month: NABUUR.com 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 1. Herko's Word This is the fourth edition of the Word of XOOPS newsletter, brought to you by... you! Again, this past month has been an active month. The core developers have been working very hard to fix many bugs and will publish the public Release Candidate of XOOPS 2.0.7 very soon, so you can start testing it for stability. If the new version is deemed stable, it will become the next public release. This development activity is having its effect on the SourceForge.net's 'most active development projects' ranking. At the time I'm writing this intro, the XOOPS Dynamic Web CMS development project is the sixth (!!) most active project. This doesn't mean a lot, other than that there is a lot of activity, but it is good PR. As you will see below, many new and improved modules have been released, with a nice number of great and creative themes to boot! It keeps amazing me that so many people put so much time, knowledge, effort, energy and most of all passion into this community. I read it time and time again in the forums: people choose XOOPS because it's a high quality system, but also because it has a warm and friendly and active community. You all are the ones making XOOPS tick and run like clockwork. Keep the feedback and input to the development coming! Keep the modules and themes coming! Keep the support for all our users coming! XOOPS is powered by you! Now, this is a shameless link to my Tagline thread I'd like to suggest that 'Powered By You' become the new tagline for the user community and the system. It's short and powerful, and refers to the strong community as well, as the fact that the only limits are one's imagination (and sometimes perseverance). I really like it, especially in that context. For the development community the tagline I propose is 'Empowering Your Future', which in turn refers to the fact that they are creating a cutting edge, state of the art tool, as well as to the community and system tagline. Let me know in the comments how you feel about this! 2. Site of the Month: This month's Website of the Month is NABUUR.com and I interviewed George Hoogendoorn, the manager of the NABUUR communities, to find out more about his site and why his group uses Xoops for it. cblue: How long have you been using Xoops for your site, http://www.nabuur.com, and why did you choose to use Xoops for it? George: We have been using Xoops since January 2004. We made a thorough investigation of possible community platforms for our website and found Xoops to be the most suitable for our purposes. Xoops is fast, stable and can service a large number of members. It has many modules we needed and it would be easy to add new modules. cblue: Your site is serving a worthy cause, can you tell the Xoops community a little about what your site is about? George: NABUUR is about giving local communities in developing countries access to the huge reservoir of resources (existing solutions, expertise, creativity, information, manpower, funds, energy) that is available elsewhere. How it works: 1. NABUUR gives a local community a 'Village web site' on http://www.nabuur.com 2. The local community posts it's problem, need or question there 3. Visitors of http://www.nabuur.com are invited to register as 'Virtual Neighbors' of the 'Village' of their interest 4. The Virtual Neighbors of one Village form an online community. This online community helps the local community to get access to the resources they need. Thereby helping the local community to solve its problems. cblue: Have you received good responses from your visitors and users about the functionality of your Xoops site? George: Yes, in general visitors and users are enthusiastic about the functionality of Xoops. Of course there are some minor improvements that could be made. Especially relating to the usability of the site. cblue: What modules do you use for your site and why? George: We use many Xoops modules, amongst others: Forums Member pages News Newsletter Documents Links Articles Polls cblue: Any special modifications/hacks made to any modules that you use to serve your site's purpose? George: We had our programmers make new modules besides adapting existing modules to our purposes. The most important new module is a 'groups' module that makes it possible for a large number of online communities/project groups to use the same Xoops modules on separate webpages at the same time. This makes it possible to have many separate Xoops sites (one for each online community or project group) running on one website and using the same platform and database. cblue: Would you recommend Xoops as a great tool for other charity organizations? George: Certainly, especially if online communities are important to them and if they have several online project groups using the same website. cblue: Do you have any requests for a new type of module or modules that would be of great value for a website such as yours? George: What would be of very great use to us is a module to make our website multilingual. A really good search module would also be of great value to us. Thank you George for your participation in this interview! - cblue 3. YAXS - New Sites Using Xoops2! PEP- May 2, 2004 Boardstyle Magazine - May 3, 2004 AERIALIS Team Flyers - May 4, 2004 Unchained Brain - May 5, 2004 Nocaut.net - May 5, 2004 ELIG - May 10, 2004 Jack vs Jill - May 11, 2004 Pinguin - May 11, 2004 IntenCity - May 14, 2004 PaitaVirtual - May 14, 2004 Mepis Lovers - May 16, 2004 World of Letterboxing Community - May 16, 2004 Gamer7 - May 18, 2004 Tennisworld - May 19, 2004 webudvikling.dk - May 19, 2004 Tampa Sci Fi - May 20, 2004 AstroStart.nl - May 21, 2004 Games approved - May 22, 2004 RSMikes Corner - May 23, 2004 Internet Ad Sales -May 25, 2004 Girl-Gamer - May 25, 2004 Riflemans Game Server - May 27, 2004 Navin PC Freak - May 30, 2004 City Latino - May 30, 2004 4. New Modules If you have a module, and want to add it to the XOOPS Module Repository, please contact Francis via PM, and tell him about your module. And of course a big thank you to all the developers out there who produced these wonderful modules! Xoops Teamspeak - May 3, 2004 Phpleague - May 3, 2004 New version of Liaise - May 5, 2004 Marquee Module - May 5, 2004 My Album-P 2.70 - May 5, 2004 Job Listings - May 5, 2004 Xoops Personal Links Manager - May 6, 2004 RSSFit - May 6, 2004 Tab Mod - May 6, 2004 Text Message Sender - May 6, 2004 Course Review - May 6, 2004 Liase - May 6, 2004 Wordbook 1.0 - May 8, 2004 I-Stats - May 8, 2004 Theme Changer 2.0 - May 11, 2004 Wiwi - a wiki with wysiwyg html editor - May 12, 2004 MediaShow - May 14, 2004 Homeworld - May 22, 2004 Dictionary - May 22, 2004 Blogger For Xoops v2.x.zip - May 23, 2004 Xoops2 Donations - May 23, 2004 WordPress multilanguage - May 23, 2004 XooperStore Amazon Bookstore - May 23, 2004 XFsection 1.06-2 Xoops Section Module Updated - May 23, 2004 Myxlinks (Open Beta) - May 25, 2004 Mantis Bug Tracker Updated - May 25, 2004 Mantis XOOPS port - May 26, 2004 News v1.2 RC2 - May 26, 2004 TechThemeConfig Bundle 2.0 - May 27, 2004 WordPress XOOPS port 0.1.1 - May 28, 2004 Formulaire V2.4 - May 31, 2004 PopnupBlog.Zip Updated - May 31, 2004 5. New Themes Change Language in Theme Tutorial - May 7, 2004 PRO2 - May 10, 2004 A Blue Gooberhead - May 19, 2004 Wolfactory - May 20, 2004 Skarvinore - May 23, 2004 Arsenic - Themes Archives 2003 For Xoops v2.x - May 24, 2004 Cloning Xoops Default Templates Tutorial - May 27, 2004 6. New Hacks NOTE: Use hacks at your own risk! They may render your XOOPS system unuseable or may prevent you from upgrading! MyLinks Site of the day - May 2, 2004 Xoops Multilanguages - May 2, 2004 Speed up Xoops by update cache files in real time - May 3, 2004 Hide/Unhide Notifications - May 6, 2004 Evennews Module Bugfix 1.0 - May 7, 2004 Flash and reals button - May 9, 2004 Hack for better search engine positioning - May 9, 2004 Multilingual Main Menu - May 18, 2004 NewBB_fileup updated - May 23, 2004 News_fileup updated - May 23, 2004 FreeContent 3.1 NewsTicker pseduo-cron - May 24, 2004 eXploZ XOOPS hack - May 26, 2004 Have you made a hack for the XOOPS core (not any of the modules!)? Please submit your hacks to the core system to the XOOPS Patch Tracker on the SourceForge.net project pages. 7. Calling all Module Developers! This is a general call to all module developers out there. We have set up and opened a XOOPS Module Development Forge website, where you can develop your modules in the presence of other module developers. The Dev Forge site is a SourceForge.net clone, meant for XOOPS Module Development projects only. Membership is restricted to developers, but when you're a member (by being part of a development project -maybe your own modules?), you get access to the developer-to-developer forums, security releated information, and you can share your experience with the other developers, as well as learn from them. So sign up now with your own module development project! 8. Giving back to the Community As you can see in the 'Make a donation' block, the number of people donating money is growing and growing. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them publicly for their continued support: 12 Anonymous, thomasjo, coterian, dwilson, kevinv, munkus, tadashi, dunkgreen, tuff, davidd, zack, kjs222, herko, Jan304, gstarrett, YourHelp, Philroy, ozboof, ronhab, sunsnapper, Panos, dlh, pygmeae, philou, yoshi, jamesmac, glenn, awreneau, gnagis, sirTanksAlot, deepsoul, madfish, porkie, chappy, alexon, bd_csmc, dr3vil, dreamgear, dobephat, johnakin, ocean, mytobaba, RuudV, juanc, _zx81, st_nick, tl, wf4sure, menochi, Wilco, felocity, bmmolloy, JohnCVermont, gruffbear, hlint, shivaji, Surpass Hosting, wpj1 You can recognise the donaters by their 'Friend of XOOPS' rank. You can join their ranks by making a donation using the PayPal button on the xoops.org website! All donations are put back into the development of the system and the maintainance of the xoops.org websites.