Book Image

Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial

By : Steve Atwal
Book Image

Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial

By: Steve Atwal

Overview of this book

<p class="MsoNormal">XOOPS is an open source web content management system, written in PHP. It allows administrators to easily create dynamic websites with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more. It has a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.<br /><o:p><br /></o:p>If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured website in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore XOOPS, putting you in the picture of what it offers, and how to go about building a site with the system.<o:p></o:p><br />You will be introduced to the main components of XOOPS, and learn how to manage them. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content on the site, and also understand how users interact with the site. As you find your way round, your own ideas for what you need in your new website begin to crystallize around what you can see of the capabilities and flexibility of XOOPS.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">To make sure that you create the site that looks the way you want, the book covers working with themes to help define your look for your pages. A case study of developing an example Intranet rounds off the book.<o:p></o:p></p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

What is a Theme?


A theme defines the general look and feel of a XOOPS site. The theme, or skin, allows the separation of code that runs in the background of the site from the way information is presented to the user. The benefit of this is that an administrator (or user with sufficient privileges) can easily change the look of a site by simply selecting a new theme and then applying it.

From a developer's perspective, a XOOPS theme consists of a set of files in a theme folder where XOOPS is installed. The following screenshot shows the basic structure of this folder:

As you can see, the folder has an images folder that contains the images used by the theme, plus a few key files such as style.css (that will control the layout and format of the various elements of the theme, e.g. fonts), theme.html (that controls the overall layout and structure of the theme, e.g. whether to use a header, footer, left block, right block, center block, or all), as well as files for the various blocks of the...