A Multimedia Presentation Tool at Work:  Properties of PHPNuke

See my website in action here.
The admin page can be found here.
Another nuke site can be seen here.

Database Driven

Based on the open source database system MySQL. 

Multilingual

Supports presentation of content with alternate language versions, if the alternate content is authored (does not translate for you.)

Abstraction

In current versions, there are only two levels of abstraction available - the summary and detailed views.  However, this could be expanded to provide a more customizable view of content.

Customization

The styles are implemented using custom html and cascading style sheets.  This allows a custom look and feel to the content presentation, based on the user logged in.

Plug-in Architecture

PHPNuke allows custom coded PHP plugins to be added to the foundation code.  Custom "Blocks" can be created.  And of course, any html can be linked from the main page, if using something other than PHP.

Multimedia

Supports all media objects available through web browsers - Flash, video, sound.

Details

• PHP-Nuke is a web based portal system implemented using PHP.  PHP is a server-side scripting language similar to ASP in the Microsoft world.  One benefit of server-side interpreted code is speed.  Using the Apache web server platform with a MySQL backend, the site can handle a decent amount of traffic. The code is open source, which is good if you plan on extending the functionality.  There are many open source extensions and plugins available on the PHPNuke homepage.  They add features such as picture galleries and dynamic weather reports.

• Another software system in use today is called Slash.  It is used by the web site www.slashdot.org.  It shares many of the same features as PHPNuke.  It is perl based and uses the mod_perl extensions to Apache.  The makers of slash claim that perl is more efficient on resources than PHP.  In fact, the slashdot site gets an extraordinary amount of hits every day and maintains good speed.

• One great benefit of this system is the ease of adding multimedia content.  The interface allows entries to the database to be made easily through the web interface.  Of course, any content other than text that will be stored on the web server must be copied to the web server.  However, if the content (pictures, embedded sound, etc.) is stored elsewhere, referencing it is as simple as providing the URL.