XOOPS Teams Bury the Forks, Web CMS Code Reunited

By Barb Mosher | Published Mar 27, 2009

It's a fairly common occurrence in the world of open source that developers join together to build a solution, then find themselves not necessarily agreeing with the future roadmap of that solution. What do they do? They break apart into what's called a "fork" and do their own thing related to the solution they worked so hard on.

It's rare though, that these forks join back to the main branch. Rare, but not impossible. This is what has happened with XOOPS (news, site). They say its a sign of "visionary leadership" that has attracted not just one, but three of the XOOPS forks to come back:

Simple-XOOPS: Multi-site Hack, Multi-Language Hack, URL Rewriting, SEO Optimization, an integrated updater, automated installer and an automated check for updates
EXM System: A number of usability improvements
Zarilia: Handlers for OnEvent, Media and Translations, Dynamic Menu System, Enhanced User Admin and Error Administration and Content and Article management complete with Sections and Categories, Ratings, RSS and more

With the recent release of XOOPS 2.3.3, work on the PHP-based web content management system is now focused on the next version. The plan is for these forks to be re-integrated forks into the XOOPS 3.0 version. This should go a long way towards making XOOPS as well known as open source CMS solutions like Drupal and Joomla!

As for the owners of these re-integrated forks? They aren't going anywhere. Eduardo Cortes (EXM) and Dirk Hermann (Simple-XOOPS) will join the XOOP Core Team — Cortes to lead the Usability efforts and Hermann to be Lead Maintainer for XOOPS 2.3, and then the Lead Developer for XOOPS 2.4 and John Neill (Zarilia) will be team leader of the Module Development Team.