XOOPS, or eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System, well known as a leading open source CMS and portal system, now becomes an application engine platform for web and mobile applications.

Xoops Engine, as the new brand name for this new architecture, supports open and extensible engines with its multi-engine design. As for now there are three engines available:

- Xoops: the official engine with new architecture utilizing Zend Framework as the primary library and Smarty as the default view templating engine, as well as some third-party libraries like jQuery. Demo will be hosted on http://www.xoopsengine.org;
- Lite: a lite version of the 'Xoops' Engine with no MySQL required, aimed for high performance scenarios;
- Legacy: for backward compatibility to support legacy XOOPS modules and templates.

During the time of refactoring, the multi-engine mechanism has been examined and proven with a couple of independent engines for different type web applications.

By taking advantages of PHP frameworks like Yii, more engines will be provided by XoopsEngine development team, and community developers are encouraged to develop their custom engines as well.

Some selected features that were most requested by the community are now part of Xoops Engine:

* Built-in cache mechanism for high performance
* Clear MVC with AOP and event hook
* Extensible URL rewrite for better SEO
* App/module clone w/o code change

Relevant documents are still being prepared with more details.

The current preliminary Roadmap for Xoops Engine development in 2011:

* Alpha 1 in end January (this release), open to community conrtibution
* Alpha 2 in middle February, mainly for developers to review code and write most wanted applications
* Beta 1 in early April, for end users to start testing
* RC 1 in June, reasonably stable for production development
* Final in early December, celebrating XOOPS 10's Anniversary

From now on, based on our experiences with previous Xoops Engine group organized in Googlegroup, we'll be forming five public teams:

1) Engine development: primary architecture, backend and front-end development
2) User extension development: application, module and plugin development
3) Documentation: development tutorials and user guides
4) Theme and design: prototype design, graphics and front-end coding
5) Testing: functionality and performance testing

If you are interested in or available for any of the teams, we would like to encourage you to join, so we can move faster forward with the development.

Few important resources, as we go forward:

1) XoopsEngine source code:
@github: http://github.com/xoops/xoops
@sourceforge: http://p.sf.net/xoops/trunk

2) Nightly builder for testing:
@github: https://github.com/xoops/xoops/archives/master
@sourceforge: http://p.sf.net/xoops/nightly

3) Code contribution guide: http://p.sf.net/xoops/contribution
4) XoopsEngine teams: http://p.sf.net/xoops/team
5) Project wiki: http://p.sf.net/xoops/wiki
6) Project discussions: https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/index.php?cat=11
7) Installation Guide

Again, we invite the whole XOOPS community to contribute to this new and exciting chapter of XOOPS!

The XOOPS Development Team