PostNuke Content Management [Paperback]

Kevin Hatch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 13, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0672326868 | ISBN-13: 978-0672326868 | Edition: 1

PostNuke Content Management is a practical, application-oriented guide to building content-driven websites and portals with the PostNuke package. Website developers will find that this guide will help you get your website up and running quickly. You'll learn how to install and setup PostNuke and use it to build fully-customizeable content-focused websites. Each section will take you to a new level of site development and will teach you tips, tricks and hacks to customize the function and interface exactly for your specific needs. Author Kevin Hatch maintains a popular PHP and PostNuke online tutorial and is an experienced PostNuke user, so you are sure to get thorough PostNuke information through this book.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kevin Hatch is a professional web developer specializing in user interface design. With more than a decade of experience on the Internet, he has worked with the Web since its beginning and served in a variety of roles, ranging from graphic designer and interface systems analyst to webmaster and network architect. Originally a graduate with a combined Computer Science and English degree, Kevin has also been a technical writer and editor, and aspires to publish his fiction. He currently lives in eastern Iowa with his wife and their nine pets. He can be reached via email at [e-mail].

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Welcome to PostNuke Content Management. The information contained within this book is designed to be a resource and reference, a guide to one of the most popular and powerful open source Content Management Systems (CMSs) available.

In this introduction, you learn

• Why you should read this book

• What you can achieve using this book

• About PostNuke and Content Management Systems

• How this book is organized

Let's begin.

Why You Should Read This Book

This book covers all aspects of PostNuke website development from initial hardware preparation to advanced customization and hacks. It shows you how to use PostNuke as a tool to develop and manage a professional website.

This book is structured primarily for technical readers who are comfortable with programming and site management. It's not necessary for you to have specific experience with Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), the PHP scripting language, or database development, only that you are prepared to pick up any missing knowledge along the way. The basics of everything you need are covered swiftly. Beginning developers are pointed in the right direction to learn more if needed, and experienced developers can proceed to advanced topics more quickly.

The biggest complaint developers have had with PostNuke is the lack of current and comprehensive documentation. I have personally experienced similar frustrations with the CMS, and I hope this text solves this key problem so that many more developers can see what a great product PostNuke is.

What You Can Achieve Using This Book

Reading this book empowers you with everything you need to know to install, customize, and manage a PostNuke website. Your site can include easy, form-based content management, a built-in user login system, news and article submission, instant community features, ad support, and much more. You learn how to apply themes and additional third-party modules to modify PostNuke for any site application.

PostNuke is an open source program. Features and capabilities not currently available in the default install of PostNuke can be added using code edits or "hacks." This book explains many of the most popular hacks and teaches you what you need to know to edit any file in the PostNuke package.

PostNuke enables you to develop a complex, dynamic website very quickly, but the limitless flexibility can itself be overwhelming with all of the available choices. This book covers PostNuke customization in real-world site examples using Case Studies at the end of each major section. This shows you how to make the right choices for your website.

PostNuke and Content Management Systems

PostNuke is a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is essentially software that allows you to add and edit content existing on a website. Most CMS systems provide tools to manage content without knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or programming.

PostNuke has also been described as a "Community, Content, and Collaborative Management System," or C3MS. The additional Cs refer to the specific additional community-building tools PostNuke includes and the large community and user base PostNuke enjoys.

Why PostNuke Is the Right Choice

PostNuke is an open source CMS. The obvious benefit of open source is cost; although some open source products do have useful support licensing, open source implementations are usually only a fraction of the cost of their fully commercial counterparts.

Some might point out that the real cost of open source is in the support, or lack thereof, for a given product. That is an especially positive feature of PostNuke, which has a huge online community with hundreds of thousands of site developers. The PostNuke website, which hosts the primary support forums, receives well over a million visitors each month.

Open source solutions are also often criticized as untested in the corporate commercial environment, but that is a myth. A growing trend among large businesses and organizations is to switch from proprietary applications to General Public License (GPL) and open source. Worldwide, governments are regularly announcing that they are evaluating open source solutions and in many cases performing a complete switch to open source products.

But even if you are sold on open source, why PostNuke specifically? First, PostNuke is well established with over three years of development history, longer than nearly every other active open source CMS.

Of all the open source Content Management Systems, PostNuke and PHP-Nuke are by far the most popular and established with the most sites, modules, and community support. PHP-Nuke is also released under the GPL but charges to download the latest version. PostNuke proponents generally agree that PostNuke aims for a higher level of code quality than PHP-Nuke, resulting in a more stable, secure, and modular program.

PostNuke's large centralized community ensures continual growth and support. Hundreds of third-party module developers exist, and this veritable army provides a development power large enough to challenge any commercial competitor. Perhaps due to the large community involvement, PostNuke has uniquely been focused on user needs and support among similar CMS projects.

The bottom line is that when you need a feature for your PostNuke site, odds are you will have a choice of multiple modules that already perform the task. And for entirely new features, explaining the benefit of your need in the support forums is likely to generate interest leading to new module development.

History and Development Forks

PostNuke was born as a development fork from PHP-Nuke (http://www.phpnuke.org) early in the summer of 2001. Developers had become increasingly frustrated with code inconsistencies and security issues plaguing PHP-Nuke at the time, but the often closed team structure of PHP-Nuke made it impossible to remedy the known problems. As a result, many of the active PHP-Nuke developers left that project to form PostNuke.

This forking of development groups is far from uncommon in the open source world. PHP-Nuke itself was a fork of Thatware (http://www.thatware.org), and subsequent forks of PostNuke, notably Envolution (http://www.envolution.com), Xaraya (http://www.xaraya.com), and MD-Pro (http://www.maxdev.com).

In September of 2004, PostNuke 0.75 was released as a major step toward version 1.0. It provides support for legacy modules written before 0.75, but also contains the new pnRender and Xanthia modules that enable developers of third-party modules and themes to convert their code over to the new cleaner and more modular PostNuke system before 0.8 is released. Version 0.75 is a turning point in PostNuke's development, designed to ensure smooth transition to this and all future versions.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into four main sections. The first part is basically an introduction to PostNuke with general installation and setup information. The other three sections offer progressively more advanced discussion of additional features and options.

• Part I, "Exploring PostNuke," takes you from server setup to the full install. There is a general overview of PostNuke terminology and all of the core modules and blocks.

• Part II, "Basic PostNuke," covers commonly used core and third-party modules and how to set up basic permissions and application of a site theme. This section's Case Study documents an Online Club, a very popular application of the PostNuke program.

• Part III, "Custom PostNuke," expands the module selection to include other useful components, such as commercial tools. Advanced theme desig...

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 1 edition (December 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672326868
• ISBN-13: 978-0672326868
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,216,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development > Content Management

More About the Author

Kevin Hatch is a published nonfiction author and sometimes technical editor. He is currently working on a number of writing projects, primarily in the science fiction genre.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PHP + MySQL => PostNuke, September 9, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: PostNuke Content Management (Paperback)

As more and more websites come online, and as existing websites might want to have more customisation, the need for a powerful content management system grows. There are several out there, proprietary or free. Here, Hatch explains in depth the free PostNuke system. It's a spinoff from PHP-Nuke, an earlier free CMS. (Though the book doesn't really go into any comparisons between the two.)

PostNuke uses PHP and the MySQL database. If you like, you might consider PostNuke to be a very "webby" way of accessing MySQL. It is laid out in an explicitly modular fashion, with each component describing a block of functionality. Hatch shows how this partitioning is in no small part responsible for a lot of its success. Many independent developers have been able to easily put together modules specific to their websites. Several chapters are devoted to examples of these modules. A chapter each on user interaction, communities, online gaming and money making. Within these chapters are numerous case studies.

It would certainly help you if you were already cognisant of PHP and HTML. Knowledge of MySQL is also good, though not as important. The module coding is in PHP, and that is where most of your time will be spent.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent book, but already becoming quite outdated., December 27, 2007

By 

F. H. Legaspi III - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: PostNuke Content Management (Paperback)

It was nice to have a PostNuke book to use as a reference guide since there are no others out there (as of 12/2007). The book provided informative background on PostNuke as well as other modules and blocks you can add. The information however can be found online after a bit of searching. Like any other technology book, they do become outdated, and this one is getting there. A number of links to 3rd party modules are no longer available, and some info is no longer pertinent to PostNuke V.8.
Still, I was able to find some core information I needed. I'd only pay $15 for it now.