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

The Visitor Experience


Open a new browser window, visit your PHP-Nuke site, and click the Forums link. The visitor is welcomed to the Forums module with a list of the categories:

Clicking the Who is Online link presents you with a list of people who are currently viewing the forum, and where they are in the forum.

Clicking on one of the forums takes you to the list of topics in that forum. At the moment, our forum is empty.

As the screen is encouraging us to do, we can click on the new topic button to post a new topic to the forum. We do not have to be an administrator to do this, but we do have to be a registered user of the PHP-Nuke site.

Posting a Topic

The form for posting a new topic is rather exciting:

You can enter the Subject of your topic, and enter the body of the topic in the Message body box. You are able to use a range of formatting effects within the body of your posting, including inserting those the little emoticons by clicking on them to add them to your text.

Before posting...