XOOPS at first glance
A few days ago I had a look at XOOPS.
XOOPS is an extensible, OO (Object Oriented), easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP. XOOPS is the ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more.
It also uses Smarty for the markup, great! I was beginning to hope that it could replace my own efforts at writing a CMS/Community. XOOPS is highly modularized, it’s basically nothing without addon modules. So I began with checking out which modules were at my disposal. I needed a gallery and a blog system.
The first gallery module in the gallery section is xcGallery. The installation was painless and smooth. Only the blog left…
The first module you encounter in the blog section is XPress which is some kind of modified WordPress. Trying to install it resulted in nothing, only white pages where admin interfaces should be. I started to go through the list. Blog module after blog module failed miserably until PopnupBLOG saved the day. However, each new blog user has to be manually setup in the backend interface. This is not the kind of behavior I’m looking for, I want this to happen automatically each time a new user sign up. This coupled with the fact that 5 out of the 7 modules I tried didn’t even install convinced me that XOOPS is not for me.
So, those of you who were scared that this would be the end of my series on writing a cms/community with ZF and Smarty, fear not!