XOOPS is an open-source web content management system, written in PHP. It allows site administrators to easily create dynamic websites with great content and many outstanding features, with a minimum of coding. It's great for creating small to large dynamic community websites, intra-company portals, and much more. It has a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.
If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured website in no time, this book is just 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.
You will be introduced to the main components of XOOPS, and learn how to manage them. You will develop the skills and the 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 will begin to crystallize around what you can see about the capabilities and flexibility of XOOPS.
The book begins with an overview of XOOPS, its history, and its community.
Chapter 2 shows you how to set up a local development environment for running XOOPS, and also what needs to be done before you can install XOOPS to have a live, public-facing, website. Once your development environment is set up, the chapter shows you how to get XOOPS installed and working.
Chapter 3 takes you through the basic configuration of your XOOPS installation, to get all the site details correct, and make sure your site is hooked up to a mail server for important notifications.
Chapter 4 covers many of the administration tasks that you will perform while managing your site. You will see how to manage users and groups, add and activate new modules, add and position blocks, and manage banners and images among other things.
Chapter 5 introduces XOOPS themes, which control the look and feel of your site. You will see what a theme is, and how to install and modify an existing XOOPS theme to customize it to your needs. You will also get started with creating a brand-new XOOPS theme.
There are many modules available for extending the functionality of XOOPS. In Chapter 6, we cover a number of the most popular modules available from the XOOPS website, and explore their installation and use. We will look at modules for tasks like handling news, calendars, creating an image gallery and a forum, and also adding a sitemap to your site to improve its accessibility to search engines.
Chapter 7 demonstrates the use of the IntranetPack, a free package available from www.xoops.org. This package contains some commonly used modules that can be used to put together a company portal. The chapter will walk you through each of these modules to give you a working intranet.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "The header and footer sections can be changed using the main theme.html and style.css files."
A block of code will be set as follows:
<ul id="nav">
<li class="first"><a href="<{$xoops_url}>/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="<{$xoops_url}>/modules/mydownloads/">Files</a></li>
<li><a href="<{$xoops_url}>/modules/xoopsfaq/">FAQ</a></li>
<li><a href="<{$xoops_url}>/modules/contact/">Contact Us</a></li>
<li class="last"><a href="<{$xoops_url}>/modules/newbb/">Forums</
a></li>
</ul>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
<tr>
<td><img src="<{$xoops_imageurl}>/images/na_l.png" alt="" /></td>
<td class="obNavWidth" ><a href="<{$xoops_url}>/">HOME</a></td>
<td width="22" ><img src=
"<{$xoops_imageurl}>/images/na_l.png" alt="" /></td>
<td class="obNavWidth" >
<a href="<{$xoops_url}>/modules/mydownloads/">DOWNLOADS</a></td>
<td width="22" ><img src=
"<{$xoops_imageurl}>/images/na_l.png" alt="" /></td>
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "Click on the link for English under Languages on the left-hand side of the page."
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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