The book begins with an overview of PHP‑Nuke; what it is, and what it can do to help you build your own community-driven website. We shall learn all the features and functionality provided by PHP‑Nuke by developing an example site, the Dinosaur Portal, as we progress through this book.

In Chapter 2, you will learn how to install and configure PHP-Nuke, apply patches, and also create the database. At the end of this chapter you will have a fully operational PHP‑Nuke site, ready to go!

In Chapter 3 you will begin to explore the many features of PHP-Nuke, create the super user (an all-powerful administrator of the site), and make your first modifications to the site. You will also learn about the ways in which PHP-Nuke restricts access to the site.

Chapter 4 introduces you to the administration area of PHP-Nuke, which allows you to manage your site from the comfort of your web browser. You'll see how to configure your site, back up the database, and manage blocks and modules.

Your site is created for visitors and Chapter 5 shows you how to manage them. You will learn how to create users, explore the Your Account module, which is the user's private 'space', and set up other administrators to perform limited administrative tasks on the site.

Chapter 6 is where we really start adding content to the site. In this chapter, we have a thorough walkthrough of story management, from both the visitor and administrator viewpoint. A story is PHP-Nuke's most versatile type of content, and we explore how to add, edit, and manage stories, and the features that allow visitors to interact with the stories.

Chapter 7 covers some of the other standard modules for adding content in PHP-Nuke. The Content, FAQ, Encyclopedia, Web Links, Downloads, and Reviews modules are all covered in this chapter, from both the visitor and administrator viewpoint. Each of these modules handles a different type of content, and you will see the functionality they offer for visitors to interact with the content, and also how each module organizes its content.

PHP-Nuke has a fully featured discussion board module, the Forums module. In Chapter 8, you will take a tour of setting up a new forum, assigning moderators, and setting permissions to these forums.

Before Chapter 9, you've been working with the standard-looking PHP-Nuke site. In Chapter 9, it's time to unleash your creativity and create a new look for the site. This is done through customizing a PHP-Nuke theme. In this chapter, we race through a range of customizations, from changing the site logo, to adding and styling a navigation bar, creating new blocks, and changing the format of stories on the homepage, among others. This chapter features a lot of coding in HTML and CSS, in addition to some changes to PHP files, and there are clear instructions to help you through.

Chapter 10 shows you how to program PHP-Nuke to create new blocks and modules. You will see how PHP-Nuke handles page requests, data access, and language files. You will also see how code is organized in a module for both the visitor end and the administrator end.

Appendix A has a walkthrough of installing the XAMPP package, which provides a working installation of PHP, MySQL, and Apache, ready configured for you to test your PHP-Nuke site on.

You will need access to an installation of PHP-Nuke. PHP‑Nuke can be freely downloaded from www.php-nuke.org, and there are more details of how to do this in Chapter 2. PHP-Nuke requires a working installation of PHP, MySQL, and the Apache web server to run. In Appendix A, you will find instructions on how to download the XAMPP package, which has all of these ready configured.

Basic knowledge of HTML will help if you intend to explore customizing your own theme, and a basic knowledge of PHP will help if you want to get the most from Chapter 10.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "… the database access variables, $prefix and $db, and it needs the module name, $module_name."

A block of code will be set as follows:

if ($numrows)
{
$row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result);
$dino_title = $row['title'];
$image = $row['image'];
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

if ($numrows)
{
$row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result);
$dino_title = $row['title'];
$image = $row['image'];
}

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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