Righton time ! It’s 9.00 am and we are in the D buiding… But nobody’s inthere! We all came together. The French speaking community decided toattend the meeting massively : Christian, Philou, Hervé, Marco andmyself. The day was starting really bad, though. Anyway, after a shotwalk around the place, we felt on a French guy who suddenly calls us inthe street. Who was that guy? Does he know us? Do we know him? Yes, ofcourse, he is Skalpa. One of the Xoops Development Core Team members.One of those guys you hear a lot about but never would expect to meetin the street… except here in Belgium, at the 2005 FOSDEM.

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9.30.At last we reach our destination. We were driven to the wrong place atfirst, but seeing how those two guys above there were glad to seeSkalpa was reassuring us all. A young guy with little round glassesaside a great blond haired man are welcoming us. They are Herko andMithrandir. Yes, now we are sure! We have reached the Xoops gods’meeting.

In the room, about 15 guys and one girl are alreadydiscussing. The first guy I met and say hello in my very best Englishis… french (Doh!). Xavier tells us he is quite new in the community,but decided to come from Lille and meet the Xoops community: Rowdy,jegelstaff, jan304, mercibe and pdaddict are some of them.

10.00.Herko officially starts the meeting. After a short introduction abouthimself and our favourite CMS, he informes us about the new communitydevelopments: the creation of the Xoops Foundation. How is this goingto work, who are our representatives and their objectives? Thingsprobably still need some tweaking, but for sure now the Xoops Gods havetheir Olympus. What about the community and local communities? Herkostresses again the fact that Xoops IS his community first. Doors areopen to every collaborative suggestions. This has been heard, you canbe sure of it.

11.00. Things are really getting serious now.Herko introduces Skalpa. The guy is in charge of the 2.1 development,and even though he hasn’t the public relation talents of Herko, hecertainly has an idea on how would be Xoops in its next version:different, innovative and turned to future. Unfortunately, no Internetconnection is available in the room. Thus, no possibility to displaythe sample site Skalpa is currently working on. We just have toimagine, website with less mySQL queries, the possibility to definespecific templates for each and every modules, totally rewritten corecode which will provide many new functionalities for module developers,compatibility with the current web standard, of course, but with futureones, like XHTML2. Xoops has an ambition with this project: being areal Content Manager System.

Some questions are arisingquickly: what about compatibility with the existing modules? If the 2.1Xoops is turned to the future, past won’t be forgotten. Skalpa assuresus that all the existing modules will be compatible with the newversion. Amongst the developers in the room feeling are difficult todescribe. At this stage of the project, it’s still hard to see whatthis change will mean. One thing is sure, though, Xoops has a future.

12.00Herko ask whether we want to make a break, and if people are interestedto visit the FOSDEM, or want to stay and carry on the discussion. Noone leaves. Of course. Skalpa enters in more technical discussions,describing new class functionalities, describing templates inheritancesystems, how themes are going to work. Even though explanations can beconfusing for non hardcore coders, we all see the advantages of thissystem: the possibility to personalise each and every created pages. Itsounds like now only imagination would be your limits.

14.15.The French connection. It’s our turn to say a word about www.frxoopsand the French speaking community. Some of the most interesting pointswere about the growing success of this community, its organisation andthe dedication of its members to the Xoops project. It was also aboutthe fusion of the 4 different support sites www.frxoops.org,Xoops-Modules, Xoops Themes, Xoops-Docs. How we did proceed, thedifficulties we met, and the final success of the operation. Thediscussion turned around the way we considered Xoops support, the hackwe made on the newBB2 version to strengthen the help provided to users.Discussions almost flamed when it came about communication between thexoops.org and the local support sites. We had the feeling the communitywas heard.

15.00. It’s jegelstaff’s turn. The guy especiallycame from Canada to talk to us about the freeform project. Julian hasdeveloped a very impressive module which allows creating custom forms.From start to conclusion, the module project leader conducted aconclusive demonstration of his module possibilities.

17.00.Time for conclusions. The only deception for the day was probably whodidn’t performed his dressed up show. Ah well… The day was over. Eventhough discussions were carrying on the rest of the evening, we allbelieved XoopsDEM 2005 was very successful, and hopefully we would meetmore of us next year.