Nuking The Competition
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If you're a fan of open-source technology, you're probably familiar with Slashdot (
http://www.slashdot.org/), one of the pre-eminent news sites for everything Linux and open-source. Part of the reason for Slashdot's popularity is its open publishing system - absolutely anyone can register and post news items and comments to the Web site. In addition to frequently updated articles (and comments that range from intelligent to idiotic), the site also offers news, online polls, FAQs, discussion forums, user-based personalization, a search engine, links to related Web sites and much, much more.
Over the next few pages, I'm going to discuss deployment of just such a content publishing system, in order to illustrate how painless the process can be. However, instead of building it from scratch, I'm going to be using the free PHP-Nuke system as the basis for this development effort, as it includes all of the features I need...and quite a few more besides!
These features include a powerful and flexible content management system, online polls and user registration support. Users can post articles to the Web site (which may optionally be moderated before appearing in the site index), post comments on these articles (a threaded discussion board is also available), search for specific articles, and personalize the interface to their requirements. An integrated banner rotator makes it easy to plug in commercial advertising, while freely available "themes" make it easy to alter the appearance of the user interface. Finally, numerous free add-on modules make adding new features, such as a guestbook, a calendar, an email reader and multi-language support a snap!
This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights reserved.Next: Getting Started >>
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