TXP Make
PHP in templates is so last decade
hcgtv
Monday, November 28, 2005, at 3:09 AM, Wayback takes a snapshot:
Nucleus CMS on hcgtv.com – PunBB on hcgv.net – singapore on hcgtv.org
Nucleus CMS
Came across Nucleus CMS in 2004, and I jumped right in after being greeted warmly by Wouter Demuynck, a then computer science student in Belgium.
Moderated the PunBB powered support forum and managed the invite-only developer mailing list. Created a Skins site, their terminology for Themes, and contributed many a skin. Recognize the Minima Blogger skin? Had to ask permission from Douglas Bowman to port it over, he was cool about it.
Led the initiative to place a top navbar on Nucleus sites, thus making it easy to navigate our properties. Brought all our text based docs together using Nucleus, long before I delved into wikis. Set up a live demo site, leading me to help out Scott Goodwin over at OpenSourceCMS.
Nucleus CMS had everything I needed, it was a super fast PHP script, it had theming by way of XML files that could be imported and exported, a potent template tag language, and a growing plugin ecosystem.
In the fall of 2005, Wouter went on the developer mailing list to announce that the Nucleus CMS project had grown too big, and just like that, he quit.
He was quoted as saying,
It was in the summer of 2001 that I decided to move from XML files to MySQL and started building a good admin interface, so I could release the script and share it with other people. It got a little out of hand ;-)
Sorry Wouter ;-(
PunBB
Registered over at the PunBB forum on 2004-06-25, by way of Nucleus.
Rickard Andersson was also gracious and gladly accepted my offer of help.
Moderated the PunBB forum, while another tab was watching the action over at the Nucleus forum. PunBB was so quick, I could be following and posting in both forums simultaneously, it felt great, like Cereal Killer felt at the end of Hackers, “Yo. I kinda feel like God!”
At the time, I was running my websites in-house, on a Govt. surplus Compaq workstation I had picked up at auction, with a fast SCSI drive for Woody.
When I installed PunBB locally, I was so impressed with it’s size, I quickly became a fan. Assisted Paul, the resident CSS guru, with the documentation, which were plain HTML files shipped with the code. The most fun of all was testing new stuff, where we heading boss?
In June of 2007, Rickard emails the team informing us of the SoftDeluxe offer to buy the rights to PunBB, he tells the forum his decision in an October update.
SoftDeluxe, Informer, all one big family, Russian owned, infiltrated by Cubans.
singapore
Tamlyn Rhodes, an avid photographer decides to dabble in PHP, he calls his creation the singapore gallery. Insisted on the small “s”, all the while competing with that Southeast Asian nation for Google supremacy, it was a hoot.
singapore is one of the drop dead easiest gallery scripts you can use. This is how it works, install the script into any subfolder of your website, then in that subfolder create /data and /galleries folders. Under galleries, ftp your images, when you surf to that location, singapore builds the thumbnails on the fly.
With full image hit logging, you can style it anyway you like, and my pet peeve, for the script to be fast. When I upgrade my VPS at DreamHost, I’m uploading my cache of digital photos, and letting singapore have at it.
Tamlyn had really nice ideas for singapore, embedding the gallery was up there in the wish list. Interest was forgotten, but I hope not lost.
NuPusi
My dream was to combine Nucleus, Punbb and singapore into a Web Portal, to compete with the likes of PHP-Nuke, a very popular script at the time, but a huge mass of PHP code that made my home’s Pentium Pro server grunt.
What can I say, I had all this energy, a self-employed techie, I can do this.
The grand plan!
The grand plan was to integrate specialized web applications to form a lightweight personal portal. The projects would be joined using built-in plugin architectures, the look and feel via standard XHTML.
Documentation was written up, distributions put together, styling help came from volunteers to make the projects look similar, plugins were written for interface purposes. Content sharing from one app to the other, signons in Nucleus verified on PunBB, it had stronger user controls.
Stories posted in Nucleus were automatically fed to PunBB for commenting purposes. We were working on embedding the forum thread within the Nucleus article, sort of how DISQUS works now. Comment spammers had gotten so bad that the only way to engage visitors was with a dedicated commenting system.
Marketing dept snafu ;)
The NuPusi project was launched in December of 2004, it came to an end in January of 2006. The name, the simple combination of six letters that sounded like, proved to be a burden.
NuPusi was my working name for the project, I knew that if we had a finished product we would be forced to come up with a new name. But I continued to champion the project’s name in each of the support forums, looking around for someone, anyone, to say screw it, run with it Bert.
NuPusi did serve a password protected singapore gallery full of racy pictures, refreshed daily from alt.binary newsgroups, but that was another time, when the cloud was in our closet.
Bert Garcia
Yeah, memories, how they start rushing back, neuron hyperlinks.
As I write this article, quickly and effortlessly entering my thoughts, all the while providing context to the story via hyperlinks, which is the premise that the Net got funding on, I’m still enthralled by it all. I am a kid in a retired man’s body, because I stayed current, my VCR never blinked 12:00.
Programming the darn thing to record General Hospital, Luke and Laura, and binge-watch the week’s episodes on Friday after work. SP or EP, cleaning heads, then DVDs. I digress :(
My advice to today’s whipper-snappers is this, you don’t know shit, cause I’ve been doing this like forever, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.
pentpro.hcgtv.net
Compaq Deskpro 6200: Pentium Pro 200MHz, 128MB ram, 4.3GB SCSI drive
QOTD
“Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, and scratch where it itches.”
~the Duchess of Windsor, when asked what is the secret of a long and happy life
txp:rockin'
