Chapter 29. Using the Topics Module

I talked briefly about the Topics module in Topic 19, "Using the News Module," because topics are directly related to the News module. Check out the home page of www.phpnuke.org (PHP-Nuke's official Web site), shown in Figure 29.1, and you'll see that each news story on the home page has a related topic, as indicated by the topic icon to the upper left of the story.

Figure 29.1. Topic icons in news stories.

These topic icons are defined in the Topics module, which is accessible from the Administration menu. As shown in Figure 29.2, you can select your own graphic for each topic you create, and you can also create and delete topics from within this administrative page. Note that you can select only topic icons that are listed in the Topic Image drop-down list box; this list box automatically lists any graphics that appear in the \images\topics directory of your Web site. So, to use a new topic icon, you must first upload the graphic to that location. Then you can assign the graphic to a topic that you create.

Figure 29.2. Managing the topics on your Web site.

You'll want to upload topic icons as one of the first things you do on your site because PHP-Nuke comes with only one icon, which is for PHP-Nuke itself. Probably not appropriate for your site, unless you're doing a site on PHP-Nuke! Note that you shouldn't use any graphics that appear on other Web sites unless you first obtain the owner's permission to do so. For example, the owner of www.phpnuke.org specifically requests that people not use his topic icons on their own sites.