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.