Chapter 1. An Introduction to PHP-Nuke

PHP-Nuke is a free tool to manage the content of dynamic websites. To be more specific, PHP‑Nuke is an open-source content management system. In fact, you could say it is 'the' open-source content management system. Since it is vastly popular, a number of other similar systems have sprung from it, and even similar systems based around very different technologies that owe nothing to it in terms of code have added 'Nuke' to their name as homage.

Although the first paragraph conveys something of the history and grandeur of PHP-Nuke, it doesn't answer the basic question of what it can actually do for you.

PHP-Nuke allows you to create a dynamic, community-driven website with minimum effort and programming knowledge. To get the most out of PHP-Nuke, a knowledge of web development will prove to be useful, but even then, PHP-Nuke is written in the PHP scripting language (as can be deduced from the name), which is probably the most popular and straightforward language for creating websites and web applications.

The first PHP-Nuke release in June 2000 was created by a developer named Francisco Burzi to power his site, Linux Preview. Since then, PHP-Nuke has evolved under his guidance to the system it is today.

PHP-Nuke is truly one of the Internet's legendary applications. In this chapter, we will take our first look at PHP-Nuke, understand what it can do, find out where to go for further resources, and briefly discuss the site we will create in this book.