Understanding the Structure


Remember that stories in PHP-Nuke form a major portion of the product and are the focus of several modules. The basic unit, a story, can be regarded as a news story, an explanatory piece, a tutorial, or some other piece of written text. Shorter pieces of text are the intended use, since there's no provision to insert page breaks (as you can with both the Sections and Content modules). These various modules affect stories:

  • The News module, which is the module that is most often used as the home page module. It displays your ten most recent stories, including their lead-in text, an icon, and a link to the remainder of the story. This module is also responsible for displaying stories full page in their entirety, and handling the addition of comments to stories as well as user ratings of stories.

  • The Stories_Archive module, which is nothing more than a specialized listing of available stories, categorized by the month in which they were published. Any story actually viewed is done so in the News module, which is linked into by the Stories_Archive module's listings.

  • The Submit_News module, which allows users to enter their own story submissions for your editing and approval.

  • The Search module, which can search, among other things, the text of stories, making it easier for users to find the content they want to view.

  • The Topics module, which displays stories organized by topic. As with the Stories-Archive module, this module is just a specialized way of listing stories; anyone actually viewing a story is transferred into the News module to do so.

No other set of modules within PHP-Nuke is so tightly integrated, nor does any other portion of PHP-Nuke have so many modules dealing with the same content. That alone means there's some strategy involved in getting stories properly positioned on your site.

Also understand that the intended use of these modules is to handle time-sensitive content, such as news (in the literal sense of the word). Only the ten most recent stories are displayed through the News module or Topic module; archived content is available in a list organized by month, as is appropriate for time-related content like news stories. These stories don't lend themselves well to permanent archival and access by anything other than month of publication. That means these modules aren't the best choice for long-term content like tutorials, which may be accessed for years to come, or recipes, or song lyrics, or game strategies, or anything else that has a lifespan beyond a month or two. That content is better organized by the Sections or Content modules, which allow you to define your own categories for organizing your content and make that content available on a permanent basis.



    PHP-Nuke Garage
    PHP-Nuke Garage
    ISBN: 0131855166
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2006
    Pages: 235
    Authors: Don Jones

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