Various questions about elxis (should I switch?)

[iDevGames]

Hi, I've used every CMS under the sun, and have a few sites now with Expression Engine, Joomla, and Word Press. Elxis seems to be off to a good start and I've read the background on how it came about. If I may, I have a few questions.

What percentage of Joomla/Mambo components work with it? In the case of templates it seems most do.
For one site, I use the league management component called JoomLeague.

Anyone try using Textile bot with Elxis? Two of my sites use Textile markup. There are a few bots/plugins for TEXTILE around, though most seem to be out of date. This is a pretty important feature for me.

I see that custom fields for users are available. Great idea. Any plans to add custom fields for content, such as articles?

I think I saw a SMF integration module/bridge. Anyone use MyBB (open source forum)?

How many core developers are there on this project? I think that too many can be bad. But on the other hand, one or two can create uncertainty in a project's future. (ie MyTopix is a good example)

I mentioned templates... is the templating engine the exact same as Joomla/Mambo or is there also an additional templating system being work on/available?

Thanks for your help in allowing me to decide on Elxis.

Carlos Camacho
Editor-in-Chief
iDevGames.com

[datahell]

Hi Carlos and welcome to Elxis.

Quick answers to your questions.
1. Our official statement is that mambo/joomla's components are NOT compatible to Elxis as they do not support Elxis features (access system, full UTF-8 support, elxis language system, multi-lingual XML parameters, file manager, adodb, etc ). Most issues raise from 2 facts: a). joomla/mambo only support mysql while elxis mysql, postgre and oracle. b). Elxis access system is different than mambo/joomla's and might raise serious security problems with users permissions. Also Elxis 2008.1 (will be released in a week) only supports PHP 5.0 or greater, PHP 4.x is history for us. Some components might work without generating errors and some users use joomla's components at their sites. But if you care about your site's security and performance you should never even try to install a component that has not been built for Elxis CMS.

2. Things for bots, modules and tempaltes are different. Most bots and modules will work. You may only need to do small changes. The same for templates, you will only need to do small changes in CSS but this is up to the chosen template.

3. Elxis bridges is a part of the Elxis history (Elxis 2006.x). We have abandoned the bridges idea for performance reasons. We advise people to create and use native Elxis components instead. By the end of this week a small multi-purpose forum/faq/support/chat component will be released for free. It's name is Bubbles.

4. Elxis Team has 2 core members and about 7-8 community members. We do not plan to conquer the world, so we are enough. We get a lot of help from Elxis fans too.

5. The template system is the same. We think that it is a simple, easy and effective enough template system and we do not plan to change it. Have you seen for instance oscommerce's templates? 

Elxis 2008.1 in action:
http://www.isternia.net/en/

[iDevGames]

Hello, thanks for your honest and quick reply.

1. I'm wondering if you have ever run performance tests between your CMS running mysql vs postgre.

> week) only supports PHP 5.0 or greater,
Cool. Just upgraded yesterday so I'm ready to go.

> But if you care about your site's security and performance you should never even try to install a component that has not been built for Elxis CMS.
Have you written a guide in porting components over? That would be very helpful.

>2. Things for bots, modules and tempaltes are different. Most bots and modules will work. You may only need to do small changes. The same for >templates, you will only need to do small changes in CSS but this is up to the chosen template.
OK, I will try TEXTILE bot. I wish this was offered as default. I hate WYSIWYG editors. They always produce bloated code.

>3. Elxis bridges is a part of the Elxis history (Elxis 2006.x).
Good to know.

>By the end of this week a small multi-purpose forum/faq/support/chat component will be released for free. It's name is Bubbles.
Sounds great. You should look into making your CMS work smoothly with Magnento ECommerce.

>Elxis Team has 2 core members and about 7-8 community members. We do not plan to conquer the world, so we are enough. We get a lot of >help from Elxis fans too.
That's good. I think Joomla/Mambo can suffer from too much democracy.

>The template system is the same. We think that it is a simple, easy and effective enough template system and we do not plan to change it. Have >you seen for instance oscommerce's templates?
This can be good and bad. It would be nice if different templates could be assigned to different categories/sections, rather than needing to slect one template for everything.

I will install a local version and start to play around.

Thanks so much!

[iDevGames]

OOps, forgot to ask. Can you list all the components that are used on the demo site you gave a link to?

[datahell]

You can assign diferent templates in any menu item you wish. There is no problem here, so you can have multiple template in one site.

You will find all extesnions for Elxis 2008.x here:
http://www.elxis-downloads.com/

And for Elxis 2006.x (legacy downloads) here:
https://www.elxis.org/extensions/legacy-downloads/