FrontPage > Hacker`s Guide to phpWebSite > Introduction

About this manual

phpWebSite seems to attrackt a lot of technically interested people. You know, people who like to fiddle around with stuff until it works in a way. People like me.

The other big crowd interested in phpWebSite seem to be either in education or in religious business. They kind of are technically interested as well I guess. In bringing you wisdom and higher spirits.

Anyway. There`s a lot of people who know about phpWebSite but not enough documentation. At least not structured in a way the guy from group 1 or even from the other crowd would need.

This is not meant to replace the phpWebSite community Wiki, which is the official manual. And also isn`t meant to replace the phpWebSite manual site. No. But what`s different?

Biased, focused, straight forward

This manual is rather biased. It really is. It doesn`t tell you phpWebSite is the best solution for any CMS problem because it isn`t. It (wants to) tell you how to nail down real-world phpWebSite problems and it wants to tell you about other CMSes and when to use those as well.

Tough goal? Maybe. But I`ll do a start. Feel free to add stuff yourself. I won`t censor as long as you at least try to remain fair. Registering, logging in and pressing "edit" is all it takes. Old version are saved in the history, so don`t be afraid about destroying things.

Introduction to phpWebSite

phpWebSite is one of the many phpNuke branches. Why the heck did people all over the place have to reimplement phpNuke all over and over? I don`t know for sure. phpNuke is the most branched CMS I know. And I know quite a few.

But I have some pointers on why that might have happened. I did a lengthy interview with Francisco Burzi not too long ago. He`s basically telling: All those projects after phpNuke make sense. Because they are special, innovative.

I think, that people simply where unable to work together and wanted to do their own business. So did the Appalachian State University one day. They did a branch of phpNuke and called it phpWebSite. Then, rewriting it all over and over, they finally were able to get rid of about all of the phpNuke code there was. They called it phpWebSite 0.9 and this version was very different to 0.8. So different in fact, that neither the dispatcher nor the modules were compatible to it.

But there was a migration-path. The current version, 0.10.2, doesn`t differ too much from 0.9. 1.0 on the other hand is said to be totally incompatible again.

the phpWebSite concept

phpWebSite is very modular. You don`t have plugins, extensions, Mambots, whatever. No, you have modules. You have core-modules, core-application-modules and third-party modules. The core-modules include

• boost, the installer
• controlpanel, the backend-interface which is actually a front-end
• help, the dynamic help icon for context-sensitive help
• language, the dynamic (interface!) translation module. note, that there is no way of having multiple-language content as of 0.10.2.
• layout, the design- and template handler
• search, the interface to all the modules search handlers
• security, some kind of Apache interface

the other modules will be discussed on a different page of this manual. I`ll also try to tell about them in a task-oriented way, like in "How would I write my news", etc.

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Last modified 2005-10-17 20:21 by rck