Forum Moderators: coopster
thanks,
I've done a number of tests with nuke and i've found it works excellently:
- it allows me to write up large numebers of pages, allowing me to 'atomise' content
- I can control all the meta tagging from one point - the admin panel
- htaccess gives me great scope for making URL's more friendly i.e. getting rid of the? in the url query
- you can go a long way with css to make the site look pretty and seo friendly ie. you would have to have a really good reason to use a javascript nav!
There are loads of addons
In fact im launching a number of e commerce sites based on ideas gathered from this web site so in time i'll share my findings.
obviously, nuke makes life easier, it doesnt answer the issues related ot search engine promenence i.e. being linked to etc...
Since nuke is opensource, I'll be giving all this stuff away. So if you're keen, I'm sure you will find me!
You can take it all the way to SEO perfection if you don't mind getting your feet wet in the coding (especially header.php for the titles and tags) but as far as I know no-one has yet produced any themes based on pure CSS layout, so you will always be stuck with the tables.
That has an effect on content placement in the page, and an effect in Google whereby the description snippet will probably not be from the core content.
Out of the box *nuke does not produce pages which validate. There's a few extraneous tags which need to be deleted and other bits and pieces. It can be done though.
TJ
PS Welcome to WebmasterWorld NickG!
He is right about phpnuke being poor on this 'out of the box', but when the relavant addons are used, it makes phpnuke really useful for dynamic metatagging and SEO in general.
I'm not that familiar with other content management sysytems, so if anyone has any better suggestions than phpnuke for SEO, then it would be great to hear them.
Anyhow, so far so good on nuke with me. And yes you do have to get into the code. But at least you have the opportunity with nuke to hack and customise at will.
But not all of us are able to hack code which is why i'm setting up a php nuke seo site in the very near future.
WHAT? :-) Is this true?
Then i guess i have found the problem why my page hasn't been indexed by google yet, after alot of visits by the crawler.
Could you enlighten me? :-)
About pages that don't validate: don't worry too much about validation and search engines - validation is important in its own right, but doesn't seem to have too much of an effect on search engines, unless you're using ultimately screwy markup.
Re phpnuke and other 'nukes: previously, only 'articles' (stuff in the news module) produced unique title tags (stuff between <title> and </title> in the space between <head> and </head>) - the other modules couldn't. I check now, this seems still to be the case, w/both postnuke and phpnuke. However, most nuke sites are going to have their most important content in news articles anyways, so this isn't such a killer issue as it may seem when it comes to your average 'nuke site.
It's also nice if you can make the 'description' tag in the head reflect the page contents. That said, most cms systems a while back gave very little regard to search engine concerns, and are only slowly catching on.
The new short-url support in the new standard post-nuke 0.75 release should help SE concerns a great deal.
In the last few years, blogging systems like MovableType (not in PHP) have done a lot better than the 'nukes when it came to search-engine friendliness. The latest developments with postnuke seem quite positive and will help even out that score. Postnuke is still a great system if you need a site lickety-split, especially if it's a community-type site with multiple people editing. It still has a whole long way to go before it's ideal, but the fact that so many php developers are still working on their own cms's shows how many cms's there are out there that really even come close to ideal. Look at me, for example; am I brilliant? No. Am I developing my own cms in spite of the current offerings? Yes.
It's not a big deal - there are a few extraneous/mis-matched tags etc - pretty easy to clean up, but I was pointing out that it's not "clean" as-is.
You won't notice until you run pages through a validator. I think that's why the *nuke team have never fixed it.
Far more of a problem, imo, is the use of tables for layout rather than CSS. Pages are bloated and tag-to-content-text ratio is low.
For non-competitive sectors, it's fine. And I do like the backend - it works great. I also like the front-end because a lot of people already know it, and know how everything works.
I have two communities built on *Nuke (heavily customised though) in non-competitive-ish sectors and have had the #1 spots for a couple of years in all search engines.
For more competitive sectors, or sectors where you anticipate spam may be a problem (often the two go hand-in-hand), a custom solution using pure CSS layout etc is a much better option.
TJ
