Nuking The Competition - Managing Things (
Page 4 of 8 )
Moving deeper into the guts
of the system, let's take a brief look at the other administration options, and
what they mean to a site administrator.
Every story published through
PHP-Nuke must be linked to a specific "topic" - this is a fundamental feature of
the system, and also makes it easier to categorize posted items. The default
PHP-Nuke configuration contains a list of topics, all of them related to
software and operating systems. Since this is obviously not going to work for
everyone - on the two occasions I've deployed the system, neither of the sites
was even remotely connected to the software industry - PHP-Nuke offers a "Topics
Manager" to help you alter the default topics. You can use this to either edit
or delete existing topics, or add new ones.
Similar to the "Topics Manager" is the "Section
Manager", which allows you to create special sections on the site. Personally,
I've never found a use for this feature - the topics are usually more than
sufficient, and the distinction between "topics" and "sections" is fine enough
to confuse the average user - but it's good to have the additional
flexibility.
Finally, a "Forum Manager" makes it possible to create new
discussion boards in the "Forums" section - note that you'll need to create
forum categories before you can begin adding new boards. The manager allows you
to specify a topic for the forum, a moderator (if you'd like to filter posts),
and the access level (anyone/registered users only/administrators only). These
settings can be specified on a per-forum basis.
In particular, these
kinds of discussion boards would be valuable to businesses in the service
industry - for example, Web hosting. A Web hosting company could set up
discussion boards devoted to different aspects or features of their service
offering - email, Perl/CGI, PHP, databases - and invite their customers to use
this forum to communicate with other customers, and with administrators.
Properly supported and promoted, and backed by a good search engine (PHP-Nuke
comes with a fairly good one), this kind of community-supported support system
would end up being a valuable resource to both the business and its
customers.
The "Forum Ranking" and "Forum Configuration" items allow you
to rank your discussion boards and set up basic configuration parameters; the
defaults are usually fine here.
Finally, the "New Article" section is
designed to allow administrators to post new stories to the site - this content
appears on the main page of the site. Most of the options are self-explanatory,
and the online help provides more than enough information on what each of the
fields represents.
An interesting feature here is the "Auto Articles"
option. This allows administrators to enter new articles into the system, but
delay their publication until a specific date. Again, if you have a complete
editorial team working on your site, or you don't update it on a regular basis,
this option has limited value; however, it comes in handy if you run your Web
site as a hobby and work a five-day week (you can spend the weekend putting
together new content and automatically release the new material through the
week!)
This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights
reserved.
