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

Chapter 2. Installing PHP-Nuke

In this chapter we will cover how to install PHP-Nuke on a local machine running an Apache/MySQL/PHP (AMP) environment. We will not cover the installation of AMP here; you can find a walkthrough of installing the XAMPP package in Appendix A. This package includes PHP, MySQL, Apache, and much more, and is a quick way to get yourself a working AMP development environment.

The steps to install and configure PHP-Nuke are simple:

  1. 1. Download and extract the PHP-Nuke files.

  2. 2. Download and apply ChatServ's patches.

  3. 3. Create the database for PHP-Nuke.

  4. 4. Create a database user, and fill the database with data.

  5. 5. Make some simple changes to the PHP-Nuke configuration file.

  6. 6. Copy the PHP-Nuke files to the document root of the web server.

  7. 7. Test it out!

Let's get started.

Downloading PHP-Nuke

The latest version of PHP-Nuke can be downloaded at phpnuke.org downloads page:

http://www.phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=1

You can also obtain...