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

Module File and Folder Structure


Before we get started creating a new module, let's have a look at the file structure of a typical module. A module is simply a collection of files (usually only PHP files) contained in a folder that goes in the modules folder in the root of the PHP-Nuke installation. The name of the folder is the name that PHP-Nuke will recognize the module by.

However, we can't just place the files into the module folder in any order. There is an organization of files, subfolder names, and filenames that modules need to follow in order to function properly with PHP-Nuke.

The image below shows the contents of the News module folder:

We have already seen how PHP-Nuke switches between files in the module folder based on the value of the file query string variable. If there is no value for this variable, the index.php file of the module is used. Files that sit inside the module folder are the 'front-end' files, which will be used during a standard user's visit to the module.

The...