Building Websites with PHP-Nuke (Paperback)

by Douglas Paterson (Author)
Key Phrases: activate comments, super user power, mages folder, Project Chimera, North America, Save Changes (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

A practical guide to creating and maintaining your own community website with PHP-Nuke

• Step through creating your own web portal with PHP-Nuke
• Simple and practical guidance to mastering PHP-Nuke
• For people with basic knowledge of web development

In Detail

PHP-Nuke is a free tool for managing the content of a dynamic website. As one of the most popular applications on the Internet, PHP-Nuke has grown into a complex, powerful tool with an extraordinary range of features, and a loyal community of supporters. Through a web-based interface, users can edit and manage their site without the need for knowledge of web programming. PHP-Nuke is ideal for running a community-driven website, where visitors create accounts, comment and interact with the site, and contribute material in an easily managed fashion. PHP-Nuke has many of the features you would want from a website such as news stories, ratings, comments, discussion forums, and its look can be easily controlled with the use of themes.

If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured website in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore PHP-Nuke, putting you in the picture of what it offers, and how to go about realizing this.

Throughout the book we develop an example site, as you are taken on a detailed tour of the features of PHP-Nuke. You will be introduced to the main components of PHP-Nuke, and learn how to manage them. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content on the site, and also understand how users work and interact with the site.

To make sure that you create a site that looks the way you want it to, the book covers customizing themes to help define your look for your pages.

Although PHP-Nuke allows you to accomplish much without doing any web programming, to extend your site you will need to get your hands dirty with some coding. The book leads you through adding custom code to PHP-Nuke, and shows you how PHP-Nuke puts pages together, and the functions it uses for the fundamental operations of the site.

What you will learn from this book?

• Installing and configuring PHP-Nuke
• Managing blocks and modules
• Working with news stories
• Managing users
• Working with other modules for handling content in PHP-Nuke
• Creating and managing discussion forums
• Understand how themes control the page layout
• Creating a new look for your site by customizing themes
• Extending your site with block and module development

Approach

Written in a clear, easy to read style, the book provides a tutorial on setting up a website with PHP-Nuke. Each topic is tackled in a clear, practical way with many examples to consolidate your learning.

Who this book is written for?

This book is written to help you create a fully-featured website as quickly as possible. Basic knowledge of HTML will help if you intend to explore customizing your own theme, and a basic knowledge of PHP will help if you want to get the most from the chapters on extending PHP-Nuke.

From the Publisher
If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured website in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore PHP-Nuke, putting you in the picture of what it offers, and how to achieve this.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (November 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811051
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811053
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #705,518 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You've tried the rest - Now try the Best, March 7, 2006

By	Gaylen Fraley "aka Raven - ravenphpscripts.com" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What I liked:

How pleasantly surprised and impressed I was with this book! Doug has written this with the novice, average, and advanced user in mind and has done a most excellent and impressive job.

I have been professionally building Information Systems for some 38 years now and got interested in PHP-Nuke back in 2001/2002. I run one of the most popular PHP-Nuke support/security sites on the Internet ( [...] ) and so I am highly critical, knowledgeable, and experienced when it comes to PHP-Nuke, PHP, and MySQL in general.

Doug's writing style is excellent. He takes you through a cursory understanding of the subject matter at hand. He then gives real-life examples. Then he challenges the reader with "What just happened?". But, he doesn't leave you there. He offers code to enhance the code and to entice you to do more. Doug explains every aspect of the core Nuke distribution and does it very well. His chapter on Changing the Theme is excellent and should help many a user to customize their site. Most other authors gloss over the theme area and more or less advise you to contact an expert.

What he doesn't do, and I am so glad he doesn't, is spend half the book on installing the environmental software needed to run PHP-Nuke. So many books waste (in my opinion) my money and time trying to show you how to install *nix/Windows, Apache/IIS, MySQL/RDBMS, and PHP/ASP. He assumes you are there and want to build a web site using PHP-Nuke. What he does do, is add an appendix that explains how to get up and running using a popular all-in-one application called XAMPP (XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.) Then, all you do is add PHP-Nuke, follow his instructions, and you have a working web site!

What I didn't like:

There are two critical areas, in my opinion, that Doug seems to have avoided like the plague. In fairness, I can understand why he did. As a preface to the following comments, I think he just wanted to concentrate on the positive aspects and avoid the potentially subjective and argumentative issues that would be generated by introducing the issues. But, what he avoided telling the users will come back to haunt them, in a very severe way - being cracked.

The first thing is that the author (of PHP-Nuke), or current maintainer/owner of the name and original code, Francisco Burzi, does not offer any support at all for the CMS. He openly states on his web site "PHP-Nuke is distributed AS IS, without any warranty nor technical support according with the GPL license". In other words, you will get no support from the author. He also does not offer any forums for support so you will have to go elsewhere for support.

The second issue I have is a major one. PHP-NUKE, as distributed by Burzi, is very insecure and prone to many kinds of exploits. Doug does mention my site and a couple others for security updates and help, but if you blink, you will miss it. The security issues would easily warrant a chapter of its own. Any one who uses PHP-Nuke needs to know about the many security risks if installed as is, right from the virgin download.


Having said all that, I still give this 5 stars. This is a book that every Nuke user, regardless of your skill level, needs to have on their book shelf. I recommend it with the highest recommendation. This book easily surpasses every other book that has been published on PHP-Nuke, at least in English :). I can't comment on the ones that have been written in other languages.

Gaylen Fraley (aka Raven)
[...]

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another solid book on open source software, June 7, 2006

By	M. Millard - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Although I have fond memories of scouring the web and user forums for instructions and tutorials on how to install, configure and use open source software, I am particularly pleased to see such well-written and high quality books coming out on open source applications every month. Building Websites with PHP-Nuke by Douglas Paterson is no exception. The author has written a book on PHP-Nuke, an open source content management system, which provides opportunity for open source software to gain even wider acceptance and utilization. I would characterize the book as most useful for the novice-to-moderately skilled user, however the book provides broad coverage of topics beyond the novice user, so advanced users will find many of the chapters useful as well. I fully recommend this book to anyone interested in learning and getting up to speed quickly on the PHP-Nuke open source content management system.

The 295 page book progresses well, and generally spends an adequate amount of time on each topic. Chapter lengths are not too long or arduous, as some can be, and make fairly easy work of guiding the reader through getting a working PHP-Nuke system up and running. In addition, I like the order and presentation of the chapters, which flow very well and are organized in a logical manner. The first part of the book deals with introduction, installation, and initial setup of the PHP-Nuke environment. The author begins in chapter 1 with an effective and concise introduction to PHP-Nuke. Chapter 2 deals with installation, configuration, security patches, and some troubleshooting of the installation process. Although I particularly appreciated that the author addressed issues of security and the reasons for applying security patches, I did feel that this chapter was a little rushed. I would be concerned that the novice-to-average user might get lost in some of the database setup steps, or in the installation of phpMyAdmin. I realize this book is about PHP-Nuke, but I think a slightly longer treatment of these topics within chapter 2 would be very useful and could alleviate any potential confusion or frustration on the part of the novice reader. I should add that the book does provide many useful web resources for additional help in these areas, and that the book also offers an appendix for installing and using XAMPP, a bundled collection software needed run PHP-Nuke and most other open source software. Normally users need to install and configure all of the server and software applications separately, which are in themselves topics for entire books, but XAMPP comes with a simple installer and a management and control interface to streamline the entire process.
The middle chapters of the book do an excellent job on taking the reader through the workings of the PHP-Nuke system with ample and appropriate screenshots. The author does an effective job at guiding the reader and creating a working system, while at the same time covering the important basics of setup, structure, and user access, as well as additional topics of system/story and module management.

The final few chapters are devoted to more advanced topics of customization. Chapter 9 discusses customization within the PHP-Nuke framework or through basic hacking of the source code, and chapter 10 deals with extending PHP-Nuke with programming through the utilization of its API-like code. Although I would characterize the book as being more useful for a novice-to-moderately skilled user, there are several chapters at the end of the book in which more advanced users would find helpful in customizing the look and functionality of the system.

Overall, I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in learning and getting up to speed quickly on the PHP-Nuke open source content management system. The book is a concise and easy to following guide to quickly learning this content management system.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Now you can be an expert to...., March 24, 2006

By	Hitwalker (netherlands) - See all my reviews

My thanks goes' to packtpub.com for giving me this opportunity to review this Php-Nuke book.
So maybe your thinking, is it something for you?
Without kicking too much i would say yes, but with some remarks.

The E-book starts with a story at the beginning explaining what php-nuke is, and that's the area of the newest Nuke Noob.
Is it boring?
No! But a concern could be that the average Nuker hates to read, many forums prove that all the time.
But the author Douglas Paterson hit the right tone in explaining it all in his own way, by making it fun to read.

The book explains very well, the first steps to take and all that comes after that.
The tutorial is well documented with pictures, also explaining even better what to do.

Disapointing is that the author should have give some people more attention when it comes to php-nuke security.
Chatserv that walks the endless road of patching php-nuke where Francisco Burzi faild.
But also Gaylen (aka Raven) and Bob marion for their Sentinel.

Sure long ago we all could install php-nuke without being afraid of any attacks,but not anymore and that's just the price you pay when you run worlds most downloaded content management system.
Personaly I believe that Sentinel should be standard in php-nuke and its popularity grows by the day,cause php-nuke sites without patches or Sentinel are hacked every day.

But lets continue....
This book will be good for not just the Noob, but also for the serious user among us.
Sounds funny but if everybody would buy it we could possibly close all forums, but like i said.....reading is not something most will enjoy.
But i do believe it will open a whole new world for you.
The book covers almost 8 pages of index, showing you exactly where to find everything, from blocks to modules, from themes to fixing errors.
It also shows a wide variety of technical details, you can read whenever it suits you.

It also takes you a bit on a coding tour, which can be a nice learning process for most people.
What's often a problem for some, are the themes,
A change of colour is easy, but changing the whole header or structure is a different story, Douglas Paterson even explains that greatly and with ease!

A good thing about the book is that it takes you "inside" Php-Nuke and shows you how it works, and what actually happens when a page is requested.
If you read the whole book, then after that, you are well on your way to calling yourself an expert on Php-Nuke.

But some info about the book...
Like i said...the table of contents takes up to 8 pages and at the end a big index.
All together the book is about 305 pages !
And also interesting...if you order the print book from packtpub.com you can add the ebook for about $5 extra, which gives you immediate access while you wait for the book to arrive.

Hitwalker
www.hitwalker.com
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