Of Modules, Mice, and Men

This business of modules is key to how PHP-Nuke operates. A module is a piece of functionality either built into or added on to PHP-Nuke. Modules display a certain type of information in a certain way. For example, the Downloads module displays lists of software that people can download from your Web site; the Web Links module, as you might guess, displays a database of links to other Web sites.

PHP-Nuke comes with oodles of built-in modules, including ones that display news headlines (that's the module shown in Figure 3.1, and it's usually the module you'll select for your home page), discussion forums, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and more. I'll spend plenty of time discussing the various modules and how they work later in this book.

Any individual page within your site is associated with one, and only one, module. The page consists of the module's content in the center, with your logo and a banner ad at the top of the page, and blocks down both sides of the page. There's also a footer at the bottom of the page that usually contains a copyright notice and perhaps a few simple links to other pages.

You get a bunch of control options for modules. You can, for example, turn off modules so that they're not used on your site. You can restrict modules so that only registered users, or only subscribed users, can access the modules. You can even change the modules' names as they appear on the Web sitealthough you can't change the way the modules work without reprogramming them.

One of the most important blocks in PHP-Nuke is called the Modules block. It's shown in Figure 3.1 and appears on many PHP-Nuke sites. It's simply a list of all active modules on your site, a sort of "main menu" to everything your site has to offer. PHP-Nuke automatically fills in this list based on the modules you activate.