This question goes out to all the tech savy empeg users. What do you guys think about PHP enhanced websites? I know that www.riocar.org is PHP-Nuke enhanced and the first time I saw it, it took me as being overly complicated but the more I nagivated through it, the more I liked it over "regular" looking websites because it contained so much info. I especially like the picture forum where it showed how many times a picture was viewed. I know of no other web language that lets you do this. And so I would like to know what you guys think about PHP-Nuke and other languages such as javascript and Perl.

PHP is just another tool to be used in building a good web site. I've never actualy used it, but i've seen presentations on what you can do, and some of the things are pretty amazing. The guy giving the presentation had written all of his slides he was using in PHP. He didn't however show anything that couldn't be done in Perl, but I'm sure it made some things easier and some things more dificult.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that you like riocar.org because it contains so much info. As long as your web site has stuff people want, the only thing you really need is text, links, and maybe a few tables/images if you want to get really fancy.

Too many people today focus on creating a site that for some reason ends up looking just like slashdot, without creating the content that people will actualy want to see.

Matthew

I have to say that all I care about from websites is content. I don't need anything other than text, and possibly thumbnails for images.
Any site using pop-ups, cumbersome scripts or flash just annoys me - and I'm on an E1 most of the time, so it's not bandwidth considerations.

It's just the annoyance of having extraneous junk you need to close/stop/get past and it wastes time for no reason.

I'm starting to mentally filter the ads on Slashdot (most of my work machines have unchangeable configs so no adbuster or clever proxy stuff will work here)

Honestly enough, as forst I didn't want to use PHPNuke just because RioCar is not a news site per say. But it's working out well for all the stuff behind it, and has given me more time to add features to the site instead of worying about the code it's self. And thats PHP's main advantage, building sites that allow people to put content on the web, and not sit burried in a book learning HTML. Tony, Tony, Lorien and Sven have all put quite a bit of content into the site without ever touching files on the server or writing anything beyond basic HTML tags.

ASP and other languages can do this as well, just PHP is more widespread at this point, and for a good reason. It's awesome.

PHP was designed from the ground up to be a server-side web language - it's original name was Personal Home Page, although it's been changed to become the recursive name PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

Compared with perl, PHP is not as powerful as a programming language. perl was designed initially as a reporting tool (Practical Extraction and Reporting Tool), but due to it's flexibility, modularity, portability and the speed at which new scripts can be written, grew out of it's reporting role quickly, and matured into an incredible scripting language. "At The Beginning(tm)" of the web, choices for cgi applications were basically C, perl or shell. It's not too difficult to understand why perl gained a large 'market share' - C requires compiling every change and shell scripts were too limited.

But perl has some problems for server-side web stuff. Firstly, perl is very flexbile about coding style and syntax. That means that it is very easy to code something that is non-obviously insecure. This was a big problem for a while when people were writing their own mail forms.
The second problem is one of code maintainance - perl is so flexible when it comes to syntax that it is difficult to ensure that code written by one person is easily understood by another. For a small company this can be a problem if a coder leaves.

PHP has a much stricter syntax, but is incredibly powerful for server-side scripting (remember it was designed for this role). It is better protected against insecurities, and easier to learn.

PHPNuke and Zope/Zend are both PHP based portal toolkits, that allow the non-coder to quickly and easily (relatively speaking..) get a comprehensive site up and running. Both are easily customisable.

Javascript is suited to client-side coding - eg to have an image change when a user puts his mouse cursor over it. Indeed, it is the only really viable option for simple client side stuff.

> PHPNuke and Zope/Zend are both PHP based portal toolkits

Zope is a Python-based content management system, with similar-ish feature set to PHPNuke, but is much more configurable, extensible and elegant.

Zend is the scripting engine in PHP.

Yeah, you're right. My mistake.