XOOPS CMS Version 2.4.0 Release Candidate

Sept. 17, 2009 - PRLog -- 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.

XOOPS has not only a very loyal base, as the number of downloads suggests, but is also highly respected in the industry. In 2008 it was a finalist in SourceForge Community Awards and in the CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. It also won the prestigious 2008 China Open Source Software Contest Award.
the #1 CMS System hosted on SourceForge, is getting closer to the next major release.

As CMSWire recently stated: "With two prestigious recognitions in less than 6 months, XOOPS is flexing its muscle as a powerful, PHP based open source Web CMS. Look for more big things from XOOPS throughout 2009. Who knows, maybe that finalist spot in PacktPub.com’s contest will become a winning spot this year."

The main features of XOOPS are full modularization where modules can be installed/uninstalled/activated/deactivated with a mouse click, its versatile Group Permissions System, and a theme-based skinnable interface, where both admins and users can change the look of the entire website with just a click of a mouse. There are hundreds of themes and modules available for free download. With the most popular modules like News, Discussion Forums, Photo Galleries, Calendars, Jobs and Classifieds sections, Polls, Video presentations, it's very easy for anyone to set up a "Community Website". And since XOOPS is Open Source, the users can also contribute to the development.

Some of the other highlights of XOOPS are: Database-driven, personalization of individual users, multi-language capability, high security, web based admin with a friendly user interface, easy to translate into any language, excellent community support, local support around the world, use of other Open Source components, .

In the current economic downturn, Open Source software has become increasingly attractive to users and companies, as it helps them to save a lot of money. XOOPS is definitely one of these Open Source projects that can provide major financial savings.

System requirements

Any PHP version >= 4.3 (PHP 4.2.x may work but is not officially supported, PHP 5.0+ is strongly recommended)
MySQL server 3.23+ (MySQL 5.0+ is strongly recommended)
Web server: Any server supporting the required PHP version (Apache highly recommended)

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About XOOPS: Founded in 2002 by group of international team of software developers led by Onokazu from Japan, XOOPS quickly become one of world’s leading Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS). XOOPS received numerous International Awards and Recognitions, among them: the First Runner-Up status in the SourceForge.net's 2006 Community Choice Awards in the Development category, it was selected due to its reputation as Open Source CMS for testing by eWeek, and the latest in Awards/Recognitions in 2008 being from Germany's Chip Magazine (5 Stars), Adobe Edge Magazine(Top 3 content management system), and ONDD (one of top Open Source CMS for Medical Professionals). It was also the finalist of 2008 Source Forge Community Awards, and 2008 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. XOOPS is the most active and downloaded CMS project on SourceForge.net
More info at: http://www.xoops.org