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When it comes to the creation of a content rich, large, dynamic website, you are invariably faced with several myths---strong enough to make you drop your plan altogether. One such myth is: it requires you to be a smart programmer to upload and run a versatile website like this. WRONG!! Getting and running a dynamic website of your dream become piece of cake without hassle or lot of efforts, when you are armed with a tool like XOOPS.

If you are a web host, Xoops can be a great CMS tool for you to easily create dynamic websites. Xoops acts as an ideal tool for developing dynamic community websites---big or small. If you want to create personal weblog or corporate intranet site, or a content rich informative portal----Xoops can be the ultimate solution for getting them and running.

To install it in your server, simply what you need are: a PHP-capable web server such as Apache and a database preferably MySQL.

To keep with the spirit of the type of your website, you can use the software differently.

As for example, Lite XOOPS can be used to create a small size personal weblog or journal. The news module that comes inbuilt with its core framework is enough for the purpose.

For a medium size website you need to make use of the additional modules such as News, Forum, Download, Web Links etc. These modules will help in building up of a community and facilitate interaction among the members and with the visitors.

A feature rich e-commerce site however requires development of some of the customized modules. You can download them free or buy from the outside developers. In any case, Xoop's uniform user management system will help you to seamlessly integrate these modules with the core system.

There are some must-to install modules which you need to use as add-ons for a stronger foundation along with the core framework of Xoops. These are:

Security module (antivirus and firewall), additional editors (word processors), a backup module to protect the data, and a few diagnostic modules for managing the site.

Here is a brief guide of the locations from where you can download these add-ons.

Security (the Protector Module v3.0)

Backup (DB Backup and Restore)

Editors (Frameworks and Xoopseditors v1.10)

Diagnostics (XoopsInfo v2.12)

In addition to the above mentioned modules which are essentially administrative in nature, you need to download more modules to support the features like news, photo galleries, links, forums, wikis, blogs and games.

Here is the last piece of advice relating to the selection of the version. We recommend the latest version which can be found by clicking Download Xoops* in the Xoops .org Community menu. The latest version---2.0.16 has been released in March 2007.