Seeing Results

A login to the Human Resources website with a Manager account quickly shows how the permissions settings come together with the shared database tables. On any other department site, the account is treated as a simple user , but from within the HR site, the Administration link appears in the Main Menu. Clicking the link provides the limited content module options shown in Figure 26.5.

Figure 26.5. Manager access in a department website.

The Add Story module is also appropriately restricted. When reviewing a submission waiting on post approval, the article category only displays All Departments and Human Resources (see Figure 26.6).

Figure 26.6. Selecting a category to post locally or globally.

Finally, this section takes a look at the results of the interface differences in the department sites mentioned in the prior section. The Human Resources opening page can be seen in Figure 26.7. It has a standard left-weighted layout with main content placed in the center column.

Figure 26.7. Human Resources department site layout.

Figure 26.7 can be easily compared to the Information Technology layout displayed in Figure 26.8. Both designs keep the tabbed upper navigation system and the logo/date/search content. But all of the elements below the header are completely different.

Figure 26.8. Information Technology department site layout.

Rather than display news articles or large amounts of text, the IT site focuses on links to department content, grouped by the floating blocks. The layout is also weighted to the left, but the color transition is softer to carry to the right. The same Admin Message posting is present on both sites, but by placing it in a more subtle side block, the Information Technology posting is more balanced with the rest of the page's content.

Like any website development, the design complexity and coding standards adherence must be weighed against the user environment and developer skill sets. An intranet site like this might need to provide support for aging legacy systems with 5.x or older browsers. The resulting site might not look pretty on an old browser, but it can be made functional while simultaneously supporting the current systems.

Final Words

Taken together, PostNuke is a very extensive Content Management System, but also look at the application as simply a collection of modular tools. You can selectively choose from among those tools to create your sites. PostNuke is designed to allow you to add and customize features in both core and third-party modules on the fly, and that's when the real power comes in. The options and combinations are nearly limitless, and it's the ongoing decisions made after the install that make the difference.

PostNuke is clearly one of the best tools for rapid website development currently available. And remember, PostNuke version .750 is also just a transitional release. The upcoming PostNuke 0.80 is sure to be even better.

Part V: Appendixes

A Speed Up PostNuke

B PostNuke Modules List

C Glossary of Terms

D Web Resources

E PostNuke API

Appendix A. Speed Up PostNuke

IN THIS APPENDIX

Improvement Basics
Light Speed PHP
Accelerate Apache
Additional Alacrity
Troubleshooting

A very common question among PostNuke site managers is: "How do I make my site faster?" The fact that PostNuke is a modular website environment does mean that the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) produced by the program can sometimes be longer than similar static layouts produced by hand or even by WYSIWYG page generators that only display one given configuration. The database back end of PostNuke can also be a resource concern, as it is with any database-driven site.

The thing to remember is that PostNuke has not yet reached its full potential. The road map laid out to get PostNuke to version 1.0 includes many changes. Earlier in the growth of PostNuke, the emphasis was on features. Now as the milestones get closer, the development is shifting to quality and speed. Each new version of PostNuke will likely be faster as it begins to natively include more planned optimizations, such as the caching of template information and database queries.

Tip

Images often have the greatest impact on a site's load time. Compress images to reduce their file size and reuse images when possible for best results.

But as you are working with the PostNuke of today, you can do a number of things to immediately improve the performance of your PostNuke site. The following sections list applications and changes you can use to speed up PostNuke itself, and in some cases they will generally help your server overall. If you are hosting your site on an external provider, you might not be able to apply all of these options. This section is immediately useful to experienced administrators, but it is also meant to be a reference resource you can return to later when you find your site has grown and you need a little more speed.