Content Administration | PHP-Nuke Garage

The Administration menu provides a Content icon that allows you to manage the content on your server. This section begins with a list of existing content items, although at first the list (obviously) is empty. Next, the section contains two text boxes, which are used to add new content categories, as shown in Figure 45.1.

Figure 45.1. Adding a content category.

Note that these categories are unique to the Content module; they're different from categories you may have set up for news stories, FAQs, and so forth. Right below the Add a Category section is the Edit Category section, which includes a drop-down list of all the categories you've created. The categories in the Content module don't include graphical icons; they're designed to be descriptive, text-based categories (which is one reason I like the Sections module better).

Finally, there's the Add a New Page section, the top part of which is shown in Figure 45.2.

Figure 45.2. Adding a new content page.

Adding a new page is easy. Start with the page's title and then select its category. Note that the Category drop-down list box won't be displayed if you haven't yet defined any content categories (which you don't need to do; you can have uncategorized content on your site). After selecting a category, you can provide a subtitle for the page. Keep it short; this will appear on the Content module's listing of available pages, and an especially long subtitle will make the listing difficult to read. The subtitle should just provide some additional clue to what the content is about.

You then have three large text boxes for the page's actual content: Header Text, Page Text, and Footer Text. You can also include a short signature at the end. Here's how all of this fits together:

The title and subtitle appear on each page of the content.
The header appears on the first page of the content. You can format this text with HTML tags, if you like.
The footer appears on the last page of the content. You can also format this text with HTML tags.
The signature appears on the last page of the content and is right-justified. HTML tags can be used to format this text also.
The page text can be split to appear on multiple pages. Just add the text  where you want the text to be broken into pages. You can also add HTML formatting to the page text.

The basic HTML tags that you can use in your content include these:

creates a line break. Use two in a row to create a new paragraph, separated from the previous one by a blank line.
boldfaces text. Just pick whatever you want to be boldfaced and surround it with and .
works similar to boldfacing, except that it italicizes. Whatever you want to be in italics should be surrounded by these tags.
handles underlining; just surround text with the tags to make that text underlined.
You can surround paragraphs with the special paragraph tags. Doing so eliminates the need to use the tags because paragraphs are automatically separated by some whitespace.

Probably the other main tag you'll want to use is to create hyperlinks. First, select the text that you want to be the link. Try to make it descriptive; if you're linking to a Web page about a book, make the book's title the link rather than providing text that just says "Click here." Or, if you're linking to another Web site, make the site's name the link.

Once you've figured out which text will be the link, surround it with <a>anchor</a> tags (which, in this case, would make the word anchor the hyperlink). Now you just need to add to the opening <a> tag to make it a working link. If the site you're linking to is, for example, www.phpnuke.org, you'd build a link like this: <a href="http://www.phpnuke.org">to the PHP-Nuke Web site</a>. Be sure you always start the URL with "http://".

The last option you'll select for a new content page is whether to activate it. Please note that all content can be accessed at any time; deactivated content is simply not listed, meaning you have to know the content's exact URL to see it.