Designing for XOOPS

Chapter 1. Before the Journey

Prepare the Tools

There is an old Chinese saying: “To do a good job, one must first sharpen one’s tools.” So before you start designing a XOOPS theme, you must first get yourself (and your computer) prepared.

I’ll first describe the general workflow and list what tools you will need for each step.

General Workflow of Designing a XOOPS Theme

Step 1: Create a Web Design

As a designer, you are of course familiar with this procedure. Whether you start with pencil and paper or Photoshop is up to you. As long as your final output is (X)HTML and CSS, it will be fine.

Step 2: Convert the XHTML template to a XOOPS theme

In this step, you will need a copy of XOOPS installed on your computer. XOOPS requires PHP and MySQL, so you should first set up the environment. There are plenty of ways to do this, but the most simple way is to use XAMPP.

First, go to http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. You can choose the appropriate version according to your operating system. For the illustration in Figure 1-1, I used Windows. I recommend you download the Lite version.

After you get the file, extract it or let it self-extract. Then, enter the folder where you extracted XAMPP Lite, and you will see xampp-control.exe, as shown in Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-1. This is the Windows distribution of XAMPP Lite I downloaded

Figure 1-2. The executable file appears in the extracted folder

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