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

Your Site, Your Database


The database that we created when we installed PHP-Nuke in Chapter 2 is PHP-Nuke's storage repository.

That may sound like a rather trivial remark; we know PHP-Nuke is a database-driven web content management system. However, it is worth understanding the nature of what PHP-Nuke stores. PHP-Nuke stores not only information about registered users of the site, and such things as your news stories, features about you, your company, or your club, your photos and other images, but also stores all the information about your site and the content it holds.

In its database, PHP-Nuke stores such things as the name of your site, the site URL, the site logo, how many stories are displayed on the front page, whether users can comment anonymously on stories, the footer text displayed at the bottom of the page, how many people have read the stories, the voting information about stories, and also what layout and choice of colors are used to display the site. There are many, many...