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 9. Customizing Layout with Themes

In this chapter, we are going to transform the look of the Dinosaur Portal with the help of a new PHP-Nuke theme. A PHP-Nuke theme is a collection of HTML files, CSS styles, images, and PHP code that defines the layout and appearance of your pages, and hence, the look and feel of your site. Through the use of themes, without having to touch the inner workings of PHP-Nuke, you can create a new look for your site, enforced throughout the site. There is even the possibility of allowing the user to choose a personal theme.

Creating a PHP-Nuke theme gives your site its own special look, distinguishing it from other PHP-Nuke-created sites and offers an effective outlet for your creative talents. Creating a theme requires some knowledge of HTML, confidence in working with CSS and PHP, but most important is some imagination and creativity!

Unlike the tasks we have tackled in previous chapters, where we have been working exclusively through a web browser to...