15
votes
Looking for a good, modern alternative for PHP nuke
Way back in the day, I used to run a fan site for a game that ended up teaching me a lot about PHP, perl, databases and so on. Currently, I'm looking to rebuild that site, but PHP nuke is now hopelessly outdated and joomla/Drupal are not the direction I want to go in. So far, I've found php-fusion (from GoDaddys cpanel installer) which seems close, but I'm curious if there is a closer analog out there.
The ideal for me is the old school blocks down the sides with content in the middle layout, with add-ons like forums, image gallery etc. Cheers for any help 😁
Are there any reasons for why you don't want to just go with WordPress? Or are you looking for a headless CMS that only has code configs but no management UI?
Wordpress is the defacto for pretty much any basic sites like you're suggesting. With all the plugins, you can make it like this without issue.
Other option is plain old HTML home page and then run an install of a BB forum alongside. There's a plethora of those too.
Re: Wordpress...
While it's a great tool, out of the box it's really not anywhere close to the feel I'm looking for. I have a couple of different WP sites already that I use as a blog and to promo my books, but it would take weeks of work and a not inconsiderable amount of money spent on plugins to match the feel of Nuke.
For the sake of clarity, my aim here is to recreate that old school web 2.0 feeling from the early 2000's, so a PHP based CMS, if one exists that is still popular enough to have a good community behind it would be ideal.
You're going to be left with Joomla or Drupal then, more the latter than the forma.
Drupal used to be aimed more sysadmin or Dev level of users and was great. I only left Drupal for Wordpress because of the company sites going to WP, however, that was almost a decade ago and I've not looked at Drupal since.
I'm not sure about the CMS side of things, but maybe it's worth looking into Laravel. I've just started with it, but the community seems great and there's a ton of frameworks, libraries and solutions supporting it. It's also the only time I've actually enjoyed any PHP coding, so that's a plus.
Could build a site with Laravel and then use a headless CMS if you're going to regularly update it. I'm not a PHP dev so I don't have any specific suggestions, but after a quick search there seem to be a multitude of options. Reddit appears to like Laravel Nova.
Try looking here:
https://alternativeto.net/software/php-nuke/
What does the site do? Depending on the features required, stitching something up with a minimal framework like CI3 or even pure PHP routing coupled with a front-end Bootstrap+jquery can get you a long way in a very short time.
Keeping the front-end code and components separate from backend is also helpful in case you want to switch to a different framework or even scripting language in future.