XOOPS

The XOOPS Projects has released Alpha 2 of its upcoming XOOPS 2.5.0 release.

This new release a major redesign of the Administration module which has been AJAX-ed with jQuery. Some of the new features are breaking a new ground for XOOPS, like the visual placement of blocks, and we're sure that the users will love them. The 2.5.0 release will be definitely the most innovative XOOPS  release in years.

Some of the major improvements/additions include new Help System for Admin and modules, MySQL Dump function, Tables Maintenance and Cache Clean-up in Maintenance, new Redirect messaging system, and Column sorting in tables. 

The focus on improved usability resulted in more visual administration using drag & drop, among them module ordering and block placement, and direct access to files for editing and folder management via a new File Manager. 

The developers also did a lot of code refactoring to use the latest XOOPS API. 

You can see a video with overview of the main new features on YouTube 

For more info and download links, please visit XOOPS Site

XOOPS Projects is enjoying an impressive increase in popularity, measured by number of new users, as well as new developers joining the XOOPS Team. This is confirmed by Alexa.com, showing a very strong 2009 increase in percent of global Internet users who visit www.xoops.org

Thanks to the influx of new developers, XOOPS Project has been able to release updates to its CMS on a monthly basis since August 2008, and to start parallel development of new versions. While one team was focusing on the maintenance of 2.4.x series, another team from France and Switzerland worked on the XOOPS 2.5.x series, with main focus on redesigning the Admin with jQuery. At the same time, the work continues on revising architecture for the new XOOPS 3.0 version, led by Dr. Taiwen Jiang, the Project Leader. 

The XOOPS 2.5 Alpha has been released on February 1, 2010, only one week after the 2.4.4 Final release

This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I've had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. WordPress
2. DotNetNuke
3. SilverStripe
4. MODx
5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your "best" CMS.

After over 25,000 downloads of its previous version in just five short months, the XOOPS Project, world’s leading Open Source CMS and #1 CMS System hosted on SourceForge.net, is aggressively building on this success and has released a new version of its award winning software – XOOPS 2.4.0.

This release focused on major usability and productivity improvements. Some of the major changes are:

• new user friendly Admin GUI
• new mechanism to modularize and extend Core via Preloads
• central support for jQuery
• improved Installer
• WCAG 2.0 - Sight Impaired Assisted Forms
• Themeable Admininstration area
• support for WYSIWYG Editors: CKEditor, wymeditor, Xinha, and Spaw2
• new System License Key
• Support to PHP 5.3

The new Admin GUI and the Preloads extension mechanism are the highlight of this release. The key for this new release was an active collaboration of XOOPS developers from around the world: China, France, UK, USA, Germany, Peru, Libya, Belgium, Netherlands, and several others. The worldwide XOOPS community is one of its strength, resulting in a quick translation of new releases into over 20 languages.

After over 25,000 downloads of its previous version in just five short months, the XOOPS Project, world’s leading Open Source CMS (Content Management System) and #1 CMS System hosted on SourceForge.net, is aggressively building on this success and has made available a release candidate of its award winning software – XOOPS 2.4.0.

This release focused on major usability and productivity improvements. Some of the major changes are:

• new user friendly Admin GUI
• new mechanism to modularize and extend Core via Preloads
• central support for jQuery
• improved Installer
• WCAG 2.0 - Sight Impaired Assisted Forms

The new Admin GUI and the Preloads extension mechanism are the highlight of this release. The key for this new release was an active collaboration of XOOPS developers from around the world: China, France, UK, USA, Germany, Peru, Libya, Belgium, Netherlands, and several others. The worldwide XOOPS community is one of its strength, resulting in a quick translation of new releases into over 20 languages.

On March 24th, the new portal of Government of Paraná (http://www.pr.gov.br/) went live. This new communication tool was presented at the weekly meeting of the School of Government by the President of the Company Informática do Paraná (Celepar), Mr. Vanderlei Iensen.

Among the main features of the new website is the color-based visual model to differentiate between the content for its relevance and ease of maintenance, and statewide access to government services.

The portal is divided into five major areas, which are the points of entry for other information:

•    list of services available to citizens,
•    services and information for the business environment,
•    information about Paraná,
•    government information, and
•    news,

all divided by tabs and color specific.