Why ImpressCMS, and all other XOOPS based systems suck.

First let me state that this is not a flame, this is just a high spirited post intended to incite rational thought about a subject that continues to be neglected in all xoops based systems. If you want to share your opinion or call me a dumb ass the comment form is wide open. You are welcome to use it.

Over the last decade I have contributed to many CMS platforms, the most abundantly of which has gone to XOOPS and XOOPS based systems. A long time ago the XOOPS community was a vibrant, buzzing geek utopia. Everyone was incredibly nice, everyone was helpful, and more importantly a solid product was being developed efficiently and with such passion you would have thought that nothing would ever take its place. XOOPS was the bees knees in mine and thousands of other developers/designers/users eyes, and no one could tell us otherwise. With time developers began falling off, feuding began to outweigh progress, and the community divided (once again) as a new project took form called ImpressCMS.

For several years before this event, I had become increasingly agitated with the state of the core, and the fact that the spirit that once thrived in that community of sharing ideas was gone. The developers didn’t listen to the people. No longer could johnny noname come into the forums with a great idea, and contribute towards the greater benefit of the system. The development had become tunneled down into the small vision of just a few developers. Those developers didn’t care to interact with the community at all, and as a result the entire project became disjointed.

Now a new project was born. ImpressCMS. ImpressCMS was supposed to be a new beginning, a fresh start for the XOOPS core. Everyone was invited to come and contribute everyone was invited to shape the system into a truly community centric system. Or that is what the users were supposed to believe. I will give credit where credit is due. The system has come a long way from XOOPS, so much that the better ideas from ImpressCMS were actually rolled back into XOOPS after they were implemented into ICMS (ah open source spirit).

I am getting to a point, try and stay with me.

Here is why these systems will always suck, and are in and of themselves their own worst enemy. Smarty. Smarty is quite possible the worst template engine available in my professional opinion.

It is limiting, and because of this both systems are inflexible and stubborn to work with. Go build a wordpress theme and write up your own cool ass admin panel with awesome options and then come build an ImpressCMS theme. Now go do Drupal and bathe in the glory that is phptemplate. Now come back to ImpressCMS. What’s wrong? Do you miss being able to do logical things without being limited by smarty?

See, XOOPS core based systems have a reasoning behind their insistence to use smarty. That it is “easy”. Easy for whom exactly? No idea…

Users are expected to learn an entirely different language for the most part, and theme designers are expected to simply deal with the cards they are dealt by the core and module developers. They tout messages like “separation of logic and design layers” However, logic in and of itself is subject to perspective. It is in fact illogical to assume you will know what every user will want to display, so why should you be given the power to do so?

This little oversight by the core developers has cost the system a great deal. At no point did the core developers of either system ask, or re-ask (perhaps I missed it) the presentation layer people if smarty was the best choice. Someone was just googling one day, saw smarty and was like “ooh people will love this, because that is my opinion.” Its not true, the fact that you chose smarty, and these systems continue to use it as their primary template engine, is the reason all of your systems do not have theme designers. No real designers wants to constantly redesign the same cereal box. They want to be unrestricted, free to invent and create.

So, for you ICMS users. This is what I am going to do. I am going to show you how you can enable php support in your theme directory. Ssh, don’t tell the developers, they might smack you with a compliance stick.

Let’s just assume you are playing with ICMS 1.3 (if you are rocking XOOPS, perhaps one of their people can help you with this).

Alright, so in ICMS 1.3 navigate to libraries/icms/view/Tpl.php and find this function

public function __construct() {

Right before this function closes add this line

$this->trusted_dir = ICMS_THEME_PATH;

Booyah! you can now rock php. However – the devs have still made it a real pain in the ass to invoke it so let’s trick em a bit. Assuming you are messing with iTheme for testing let’s create a file named functions.php in that folder and add the following lines to the top of your theme.html file.

<{assign var=theme_name value=$xoTheme->folderName}><{include_php file="$theme_name/functions.php"}>

So, I am going to assume you know how to write php scripts and just give you a quick example to illustrate your limitless possibilities.

	global $xoopsDB, $xoopsTpl;
	
	$link = mysql_connect(XOOPS_DB_HOST, XOOPS_DB_USER, XOOPS_DB_PASS);
	//Let's create a table if one doesn't exist
	$sql = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS " . $GLOBALS['xoopsDB']->prefix() . "_theme_options (oid VARCHAR(255), val VARCHAR(255))";
	mysql_query($sql, $link) or die(mysql_error());

refresh you page and check your database to see your new table created. Now you can do things like:

$addrows = "INSERT INTO " . $GLOBALS['xoopsDB']->prefix() . "_theme_options (oid, val) VALUES ('first_link_title', 'Home')";
mysql_query($addrows, $link) or die(mysql_error());

Oh my, we have table rows people! What if we?

	$getem = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM " . $GLOBALS['xoopsDB']->prefix() . "_theme_options");
	while($row = mysql_fetch_array($getem) ) {
		$theval = $row['val'];
		$xoopsTpl->assign('foo',$theval);
	}

No! no way it could be that simple right? Alright, lets find out. Go back to theme.html and find the nav menu section. Look at that first link and change it to this.

<{$foo}>

Voila! You can now get all kinds of fancy, make your own wordpress inspired admin panels, or just use php to store some values in the database and grab them as needed. The point is, that you aren’t restricted by opinions.

Hope you find it useful, and even more hopeful that you systems using smarty will wise up. It sucks.