Driven by the efforts of the French XOOPS community, XOOPS has released a final version of 2.5.0. The improvements in version 2.5.0 are focused on the administration area, with a generous use of jQuery for a comfortable feel for common actions, similar to a desktop application.

There are no major compatibility issues between XOOPS 2.4.x and 2.5.0, but there have been some reports of issues in their forums, which is to be expected of any new release.

The most notable changes in the XOOPS admin area are in the blocks adminstration, where you can drag and drop blocks into the areas you want them, and the addition of a File manager, which allows you to add, remove or edit files on your server instead of having to use FTP or the control panel of your web host account to manage files.The block layout is fixed on the current block positions in XOOPS, so you are not able to add additional positions on your page, but for most applications, this is sufficient. I'm rather skeptical about allowing file management in the application, and this will be convenient for site adminstrators, but also a security weakness if adminstered improperly.

You can learn more about the XOOPS 2.5.0 release in their press release and their complete change log.

Requirements

• Any PHP version >= 5.2+
• MySQL server 5.0+
• Any server supporting the required PHP version (Apache highly recommended)

Download

If you have any experiences with using XOOPS 2.5.0 for your church or ministry web site, we'd love to hear about it! Add a comment or tell us about it in the forums.

Peace!