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Acknowledgments

I'd like to acknowledge everyone at Prentice Hall who's worked so hard to produce this book, as well as my literary agency, Studio B, for helping to shepherd the book through to completion. I'd like to thank the PHP-Nuke community for continuouslyand selflesslyworking to make such an easy-to-use, flexible piece of software. I'd also like to recognize the many folks who reviewed this text and offered suggestions and comments (although the final content is entirely my responsibility): Derek Melber, Joe Naberhaus, Tim Evans, Robert Husted, and series editor Eben Hewitt. Everyone's top concern was making this book as useful as possible.

Part I: PHP-Nuke Quick Start

What Is PHP-Nuke?

How PHP-Nuke Works

Understanding the Nuke Lingo

Finding a PHP-Nuke Host

Installing PHP-Nuke

Configuring Site Preferences

Choosing Modules

Choosing Blocks

Writing a Story

Chapter 1. What Is PHP-Nuke?

Let's start by ignoring the Nuke part of PHP-Nuke; it isn't nuclear - powered , and there's almost no danger of it starting a fission reaction or anything. The PHP part stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (or something like thatit depends on whom you ask). Yeah, the P in PHP stands for PHP . It's called a self-referential acronym, and it's thought to be cute by the tech-heads who come up with this stuff.

Language lesson aside, PHP-Nuke is what we in the biz call a content-management system . In English, that means PHP-Nuke is a place where you can put gobs of contentnews articles, recipes, videogame tips, or whatever you likeall in one place. You can manage that content so that only certain people have access, so that certain content is published at a specific time, and so forth.

It's probably more accurate to say that PHP-Nuke started as a content-management system. Today's PHP-Nuke has grown into a full-fledged "Web site in a box" software package that contains everything but the kitchen sink. And I'm pretty sure I saw a kitchen sink add-in somewhere on the Internet. You (or, better yet, someone else) can install PHP-Nuke and get a Web site up and running in a few seconds. And that Web site won't be some weak-looking site that you put together in FrontPage; no, it'll be a complete Web site, with discussion boards , the capability for users to register, a newsletter-sending facility, and bunches more. All built right in. You can make your new Web site look however you want, thanks to PHP-Nuke's support for themes which, like Garanimals clothes for kids , let you select a coordinated look and feel for your Web site simply by selecting a menu option.

Okay, bottom line: What is PHP-Nuke, anyway? It's a tool for building Web sites that do what you want, look like what you want, and behave like you want. Like a big box of Legos, PHP-Nuke gives you a lot of components to work with, but you can assemble them in almost any way you please to make the Web site you really want.

Yeah, but What Is It?

Bear with me for some technical background material. PHP is a separate technology, designed for server-side scripting. Essentially, you make normal Web pages, which are formatted using the Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. PHP then adds programming code right in with the HTML. When a Web browser asks a Web server for a PHP page, the Web server takes a moment to execute all that PHP code. The code runs on the server and does stuff like access the database, output text, and so forth. The practical upshot of all this is that you get a dynamic Web page , one which might look a bit different each time it's sent to a Web browser.

For a simple example, point your Web browser to www.ScriptingAnswers.com/cms2. Each time you look at this page, it'll be slightly different: Perhaps a different survey will be shown or the login security code will change. That's all the result of PHP code, or scripts, being executed on the Web server as the page is being transmitted to your Web browser.

PHP-Nuke is written entirely in PHP. So PHP-Nuke is basically a big bucket of Web pages with PHP scripts embedded in them. PHP, by the way, is completely free. Most of the databases used by PHP-Nuke (MySQL is a popular choice) are free. PHP-Nuke is free. The Apache Web server software usually used to host PHP-Nuke sites is free. The Linux operating system usually used on PHP-Nuke Web servers iswait for itfree. You can see how software would become popular with that pricing model.

So PHP-Nuke uses all of the PHP magic to create a Web site. How much do you need to know about PHP to use PHP-Nuke? Nada. Sure, a little bit of knowledge can go a long way if you really want to dive into PHP-Nuke and tweak it, but you don't need to do that. Most of the customization you do with PHP-Nuke is all done from a Web-based administrative interface, where you just click buttons and stuff to change the way your site works. You don't even need to know much in the way of HTML or anything else to use PHP-Nuke. It's just that simple to use.

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Acknowledgments