Sections? News? Content?

PHP-Nuke certainly provides a lot of places for you to post content. Which should you use? That all depends on your specific needs. Here are some recommendations:

• Use the News module, which I covered in Topic 19, "Using the News Module," for content that should appear on your home page. While home page publication is optional for news items, the News module is the default home page module and PHP-Nuke is really designed to stay that way.

  Keep in mind that news stories (or articles, or whatever you want to call them) are organized using an overlapping system of topics and categories, which means that news articles can be classified more granularly. News articles are also automatically archived by the Stories Archive module, making it easy to locate past stories by their month of publication.

• Use the Sections module for content that can be organized by a single category, since that's all the Sections module provides for. Content won't be published on the home page and won't be accessible through a monthly archive, but the content can have slightly more robust formatting (the <!--pagebreak--> tag) and content doesn't rotate "out of view" the way news articles do.

  Also, the Sections module makes it easier to wade through larger quantities of content. The News module displays only 10 stories at a go, making it necessary to use the Search module or the Stories Archive module to track down older content.

• The Content module also organizes by a single level of categorization and provides access to larger lists of available content. Content categories don't have associated graphics the way the Sections categories do, so that's a visual consideration. Otherwise, quite frankly, the Content module isn't that different from the Sections module. They do differ in how they visually present their lists of categories and such, but that's about it. I covered the Content module in Topic 12, "Using the Content Module."