Nuking The Competition (
Page 1 of 8 )
The PHP-Nuke content management system is a popular open-source
project, designed to help you get your Web site off the ground with minimum
fuss...and if you're a budding Webmaster, or just running on a tight
schedule, it can probably make your life simpler. This article discusses
deploying and customizing the system to your needs.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.
