up late with XOOPs.

After completely moving towards tabless designs, it is hard to look at the cluttered code of tables in code. I have probably put in 15 hours of playing with XOOPs now, a few of these hours stripping code down to be more CSS driven. I am all about clean code these days, but boy do I have my work cut outr for me. I am having problems giving up complete control with layout with a lot of what I am working on, but I have to stay focused on the prize: added functionality without a lot of effort. Last night I upgraded my install to XOOPs 2.2 from 2.13. The upgrade was painless, but some of the modules I want to use are not compatible with the new version. I will wait. Ideally I would some day produce my own CMS, and this idea is why I have been looking at several CMS packages. I would like to take the best from what I have worked with and put it all together. I am at least a year away from doing this, but it is something I am looking towards. I chose XOOPs for several reasons, but one of the main reasons was because it uses Smarty, and I am curious how it handles these templates on a large scale. I am learning a lot about seperating my content from my php code and layout. It is a bit confusing sometimes because of old habits, but it is coming together nicely. I am hoping to have something to show everyone after another 10 or so hours this weekend. I could have easily used one of the layout that comes with XOOPs, but if you know me, you know I could easily spend several hours trying to figure out how to get everything perfectly lined up to the exact pixel, so a custom layout was certainly needed…and a complete CSS driven layout of course. Overall, my work with XOOPs has been pretty positive. Version 2.2 really cleaned up the admin interface which I greatly appreciate. My only complaint so far is that I have to wait a few days/weeks for my choice modules to be updated. OK, I do have one more…the screen refreshes when you authenticate. I would like to go to the page, not refresh to include new content…but I am trying to read up about that…perhaps I can do something about that. Everything is customizable, right? 😉