Downloading PHP-Nuke

The latest version of PHP-Nuke can be downloaded at phpnuke.org downloads page:

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

You can also obtain older versions of PHP-Nuke, including version 1.0, from SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7511&package_id=7622

SourceForge is the world's largest home of open-source projects. Many projects use SourceForge's facilities to host and maintain their projects. You can find almost anything you want on SourceForge—whether it is in a usable state or has been updated recently is another matter.

Extracting PHP-Nuke

Once you have downloaded PHP-Nuke, you should extract the contents of the PHP-Nuke ZIP archive to the root of your c:\ drive. You will have to create a folder called PHP-Nuke-7.8 in the root of your c:\ drive. (If you extract the files elsewhere, create the folder PHP-Nuke-7.8 and copy the contents of the main unzipped folder to this new folder).

Note

If you don't have a tool for extracting the files, you can download an evaluation edition (or buy a full edition) of WinZip from www.winzip.com .

There are also free, powerful, extracting tools such as ZipGenius (http://www.zipgenius.it/index_eng.htm) and 7-Zip (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/ ) among others.

In the PHP-Nuke-7.8 folder, you will find three subfolders called html, sql, and upgrades. The upgrades folder contains scripts that handle upgrading the database between different versions, the sql folder contains the definition of the PHP-Nuke database that we will be working with, and the html folder contains the guts of your PHP-Nuke installation.

The html folder contains all the PHP scripts, HTML files, images, CSS stylesheets, and so on that drive PHP-Nuke. Within the html folder are further subfolders; some of these include:

• modules: Contains the modules that make up your PHP-Nuke site. Modules are the essence of PHP-Nuke's operation; we look at them from Chapter 3 onwards.
• blocks: Contains PHP-Nuke's blocks. Blocks are 'mini-functionality' units and usually provide snippet views of modules. We will look at blocks in Chapter 4.
• language: Contains PHP-Nuke language files. These allow the language of PHP?Nuke's interface to be changed.
• images: Contains images used in the display of the PHP-Nuke site.
• themes: Contains the themes for PHP-Nuke. The use of themes allows you to completely change the look of a PHP-Nuke site with a click of a button.
• includes, db: Contain code to support the running of PHP-Nuke. The db folder, for example, contains database access code.
• admin: Contains code to power the administration area of your site.