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

What Exactly is PHP-Nuke?


PHP-Nuke is a collection of PHP scripts that run on a web server, connect to a database, and display the retrieved data in a systematic way. In other words, PHP-Nuke is a data-driven PHP web application.

PHP-Nuke can be downloaded for free, and then installed to your local machine for testing and development. The files and the database can be uploaded to a web hosting service, so that your site will be available to anyone on the Internet. There are even web hosting services that offer PHP‑Nuke installation at the click of a button.

Modular Structure

PHP-Nuke is built around a 'core' set of functions, which perform mundane tasks such as selecting what part of the application the user should be shown, checking who the user is, and what they can do on the site. The thing that makes PHP-Nuke exciting to the world is the set of modules that comes with it. These modules provide the real functionality of the site, and include ones for news and article management, downloads, and forums, among others. The modules can be switched on and off with ease, and other modules can be added to the system.

There is no shortage of third-party modules on the Internet, and you can find a PHP-Nuke module for almost any imaginable purpose.

Themed Interface

The look of a PHP-Nuke site is controlled by a theme. This is a collection of images, colors, and other resources, and instructions that determine the layout of the page. A new theme can be selected, and your site will be transformed immediately. Visitors with a user account on the site are able to select their own personal theme.

Multi-Lingual Interface

PHP-Nuke comes with many language files. These contain translations of standard elements on the site interface. The availability of these translations reflects the international nature of the PHP‑Nuke community.