So good ole
Gortbusters had started
out as a nuke site. For those not familiar with it,
Nuke is a popular content management
system written in
PHP. It is written
and largely maintained by one guy down in Venezuela called
FB.
Ignorant of alternatives at the time and just wanting to get a site up
quickly, I jumped on the band wagon. It looked like hundreds of
thousands had already did and there were so many nukeWHATEVER.net sites
around that you could get tons of software for free.
Well, truth be told
phpnuke.org and other
sites like
nukecops.com got hacked many
times with the
6.5
release of their sotware. Of course you could get it early from
their
10 dollar
a month club, but that didn't help you with your security
fixes. They tried to integrate phpBB into their system but
it was poor at best with lots of
bugs
and poor features surrounding the whole thing. I lost count of
the constant fixes and updates (for both security and features) that I
knew the end was near for this.
Many
times FB has wanted to
rewritethe
software. After a while I even thought about rewriting it, just
as many
others
have done, most notably
myPHPNuke
which spawned
X-oops, and
PostNuke which spawned
Envolution and
Xaraya. Who
has the time for this? I wouldn't have the time for things like
Tracking School if I wanted to
re-write Nuke.
The icing on the cake for nuke is now a
commercial
licensing scheme. That link will take you to the story where
just about everyone is in an outrage. More or less it just means
that if you want a solution now you'll have to pay or wait for a while
unitl a major release is sent out.
I was now faced with some choices... do I rewrite nuke and scour it for
security holes? Do I migrate things into slashcode? Do I
look for a phpBB oriented solution? Do I just say f-it all and
get some sleep? While all had their pros and cons I choose to
find something that was oriented around phpBB. The Gortbusters
user base is often fascinatined with things like living with nature and
when they do post they enjoy the user-friendly interface of
phpBB. More imporantly, phpBB (like slash) both are maintained by
a group of people and work very professionally. The quality is
the largest selling point. You can easily spot simple poorly
optimized code in nuke, which reading the
php
manual will point you to a better solution. The best example
is that eregi is over-used in nuke when
strposis
the fastest function for a needle-in-a-hay-stack call.
Looking around for a
phpBB oriented CMS
(of which there are a few), I came across
MX-system.
The phpBB team will be releasing their own portal software, but I can't
wait for it as it won't be ready for months - and who knows how many
Nuke holes will be found by then. MX-system promised easy
integration with just about no modifications to the existing phpBB
software! Score. The one thing that sunk me on the
bbtonuke project was that they
were always behind the current phpBB code. The only thing
remaining was a news posting module for their system, as none was
written yet. I found
Codemonkeyx.net
had a nice news front page modification to phpBB. I took that,
modified it for MX, and wrote an import script to convert my nuke
database tables into phpBB. Voila, I'm happy and you can
see it in action.
I hate to put down an open source project, but nuke seems to be run by
one person who dictates everything. Had it been better managed,
maybe the phpBB team wouldn't have the need to write a portal because
they would have been working with Nuke from the start. Ah well,
such is life.