Book Image

Building Websites with PHP-Nuke

Book Image

Building Websites with PHP-Nuke

Overview of this book

PHP-Nuke is a free tool for managing the content of a dynamic website. As one of the most popular applications on the Internet, PHP-Nuke has grown into a complex, powerful tool with an extraordinary range of features, and a loyal community of supporters. Through a web-based interface, users can edit and manage their site without the need for knowledge of web programming. PHP-Nuke is ideal for running a community-driven website, where visitors create accounts, comment and interact with the site, and contribute material in an easily managed fashion. PHP-Nuke has many of the features you would want from a website such as news stories, ratings, comments, discussion forums, and its look can be easily controlled with the use of themes. If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured website in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore PHP-Nuke, putting you in the picture of what it offers, and how to go about realizing this. Throughout the book we develop an example site, as you are taken on a detailed tour of the features of PHP-Nuke. You will be introduced to the main components of PHP-Nuke, and learn how to manage them. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content on the site, and also understand how users work and interact with the site. To make sure that you create a site that looks the way you want it to, the book covers customizing themes to help define your look for your pages. Although PHP-Nuke allows you to accomplish much without doing any web programming, to extend your site you will need to get your hands dirty with some coding. The book leads you through adding custom code to PHP-Nuke, and shows you how PHP-Nuke puts pages together, and the functions it uses for the fundamental operations of the site.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Building Websites with PHP-Nuke
Credits
About the Author
Preface
Installing XAMPP

Getting Help in the PHP-Nuke Community


PHP-Nuke has a substantial user base. There is a large group of people who run PHP-Nuke sites, develop extensions to PHP-Nuke, and create visual customizations, among other activities. All this leads to a vibrant community that pushes the product forward, helps to address the problems faced by people working with PHP-Nuke, and offers support and encouragement to users.

There are a number of sites dedicated to PHP-Nuke that contain a range of PHP-Nuke resources, such as add-ons, bug fixes and patches, tutorials, and so on. You will also find the option of paid support for PHP-Nuke, and since PHP-Nuke is such a popular and widespread application, it will not be difficult to find a PHP developer who has experience of working with PHP-Nuke.

Each of these sites is well worth a visit to see what they offer:

  • http://phpnuke.org: This is the home of PHP-Nuke, run by Francisco Burzi, the creator and maintainer of PHP-Nuke. From here, you can download the latest version of PHP-Nuke. This is also a good place to find news of the latest offerings from the PHP-Nuke community, including new sites running on PHP-Nuke.

  • http://www.nukecops.com: There is a particularly large forum here, with many posts on problems encountered by PHP-Nuke users. If you find yourself with a problem, then the Nukecops.com forums are a good bet to find a solution.

  • http://www.nukeresources.com: This is the home of the PHP-Nuke patches that we will use when installing PHP-Nuke. There is also an extensive list of downloads here, as well as a number of tutorials.

  • http://www.karakas-online.de/EN-Book/: This is the PHP-Nuke HOWTO. This is a massive collection of tips and tricks for working with PHP-Nuke, solving common problems, and useful hacks. This document is also found on a number of other PHP-Nuke websites as the PHP-Nuke HOWTO.

  • http://thethemes.cc/: This is a site with dozens of PHP-Nuke themes aimed at gaming sites.

  • http://ravenphpscripts.com/: NukeSentinel, a security add-on for PHP-Nuke, can be found here.

Many of the PHP-Nuke sites will have links to other recommended PHP-Nuke sites. In addition to providing valuable resources and information, all these sites will give you a good idea of what it is possible to accomplish on a PHP-Nuke site.