Nuke & Postnuke Content Managment Systems

[ElgertS]

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

PHPNuke and Postnuke are two popular Content Management Systems written for the Apache, MySQL, PHP (AMP) platform. Both have large user communities who provide incredible technical support. Postnuke is a derivative of the original PHPNuke and they are now both being developed separately. Both systems offer modular additions to their core feature set. Some important modules include PHPBB, used in this eBBS as well as the popular Gallery web photo system.

The primary goal of both solutions has been creation of a community website with online forums, news postings, and file downloads. They both use Blocks of PHP instructions to create navigation, advertisements, and other interface options for your website. The user interfaces for each are completely customizable via themes. Each theme consists of PHP and CSS information. The NukeNews theme is a special theme that relies mainly on easily edited html snippets that can be altered within Dreamweaver or Golive.

Thanks to the rich back-end administration functionality, customization options, and extensibility of these solutions it can be quite effective for developing a powerful and easy to manage website leveraging off the coding efforts of scores of programmers.

Update: PHPNuke 7.1 now supports user subscription management for your Nuke website.

Important URLs:

PHPNuke home: http://www.phpnuke.org/
Postnuke home: http://www.postnuke.com/
Nuke Cops: http://www.nukecops.com/
Nuked Gallery: http://www.nukedgallery.net/
Ecommerce Nuke: http://www.osc2nuke.org/

[ElgertS]

Step 1: Download Nuke

Download the PHPNuke or Postnuke source code from their respective websites:

PHPNuke: http://www.phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=1

Postnuke: http://download.hostnuke.com/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=34

In both the compressed file will generate a folder containing the project. Both structure their installs the same way starting with a project root folder named along with the current release. Inside of this are a variety of readme files and additional folders for SQL code, upgrading, and a folder called “html”. The “html” folder is where the Nuke projects actually reside. All the php scripts including index.php are found in this home directory for your Nuke site. The full Nuke documentation is found in there as well.

[ElgertS]

Step 2: Installation

Copy the “html” folder to the location you want to serve your Nuke site from. Configure the web server appropriately for the site hosting.

Now open PHPMyAdmin and create a database for Nuke. This can be named whatever you choose. by default each wants the database named after itself: “nuke” for PHPNuke & “postnuke” for Postnuke.

Go to the SQL option in PHPMyAdmin within your new database and select “Choose File”. Within the SQL directory of your initial project download folder you will find the code for creating the database.

[ElgertS]

Step 3: Configuration

Open the file “config.php” and fill in the information it requires for the following variables:

$dbhost: <yourservername> (this can be localhost in most cases)
$dbuname: <mysqlusername>
$dbpass: <mysqluserpassword>
$dbname: <mysqlnukedbname>

[ElgertS]

Step 4: Administration

Your Nuke site is now operational! Point your browser to the website’s administration section:

http://<yournukedomain>/admin.php

You will need to create a Superuser account immediately. Once that is completed you can begin exploring your Nuke installation.

[ElgertS]

Step 5: Theme Customization

Nuke & Postnuke utilize Themes to manage their site-wide appearance. These themes are handled with PHP and CSS files. One of the Themes has a html front end for simplified editing of the Theme.

To make your own Theme, go into the Themes directory and make a copy of “NukeNews” renaming it as you would like your Theme to be titled. Within this folder you will find a variety of html snippets that can be edited in the html editor of your choice including visual tools such as Golive or Dreamweaver. You will also want to edit the CSS information to alter how fonts appear in your site, especially to match the colors you decide to use in your new Theme.

[ElgertS]

Step 6: Nuke Additions

The Nuke projects can be enhanced by adding Modules or Blocks. Block are navigation and page information elements that remain ever-present as your visitor attends your website. Besides creating navigation menus, Blocks can display advertising and dynamically chosen information from the Nuke site.

Modules are third party software that are added within Nuke. This can be specially made Nuke modules or they can be full-blown projects that can reside within Nuke as well as on their own. A prime example of this is Gallery. Gallery can be installed within Nuke simply by copying it within the Modules directory of your Nuke site. Once installed within Nuke, Gallery abides by the interface standards you have configured for Nuke and utilizes Nuke’s authentication instead of its own. Integration of the two projects is quite compelling and many additional enhancements such as specialized Blocks are available for Nuke sites that have Gallery installed.

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