“I’ve been modifying PHP-Nuke 4.4.1a for use as the publishing
system for VarLinux.org and Petreley.org, which is a site I’m doing
in my off-hours….PHP-Nuke is a Weblog publishing system, written
in PHP, with MySQL as the database back end.”
“To be fair, PHP-Nuke’s programmers may not have deliberately
taken a disorganized approach; they may have simply fallen into
some common PHP traps. Although it is entirely possible to build a
modular Website with PHP, the language tends to discourage
modularity because PHP code integrates right into HTML.”
“That is why PHP is simultaneously irresistible and prone to
disorganization. It is irresistible because with PHP, you can crank
out MySQL data and turn it into a page of information more easily
than with just about any other Web-programming system. It is prone
to disorganization because the HTML opening formatting tags that
you create inside a PHP function are often completed by other PHP
functions. That means that every time you change the opening
formatting tags, you have to find every occurrence where the
closing tags must match. The format tags that get you into trouble
most often are the table, row, and data tags. If you don’t handle
those tags properly, many of your page elements will be scattered
into the wrong places.”