After many trials and errors with a few blog software: joomla, mambo, wordpress, b2evolution... we decided to go with Nucleuscms system. Although it's not well established as others, but to us, it has most of the STUFF we want and it's very easy to customize. The system is basic, there... ... are many skins and plugins to make the website wonderful, but the documentation is not clear and it does take a non-programmer, non-webdesigner, a long time to implement all the nice things for the website. This write up is to document STUFF we've learned while experiencing with this software. We hope this documentation will help people to use this fine Free Content Management System easily & promote it widely.
There always are many ways to skin a cat as they say, this is the way we skinned ours, so please, use ours as a reference only.
Alright, if you're setting up this system with justhost.com then just follow what we do, if not, start to install the system from nucleus installation.
We can summarize the manual installation above as follows:
- Create a nucleus folder in your server public root directory/unzip the nucleus V3.50 installation package in this folder/you should have all the files of nucleus with install.php & install.sql.
- Create a data base with utf-8 support if you want to use special characters like European fonts for your nucleus system. Justhost happens to work with Nucleus eng-utf8 very well with special fonts.
- Use web browser to install nucleus by typing on the address bar: http://yourdomain.com/yournucleusdirectory/install.php and start filling in the created database, if this one is not called out correctly, error will occur. Every host has its own way of accessing its database. When it's done, all you need to finish everything off is to remove these 2 install files and set config.php to 444.
*Using Jushost.com Fantastico to install Nucleus3.5
Assuming we're already know how to upload, ftp all the STUFF to our server with justhost.com. At this time, the newest version of Nucleus is V3.50, we tried it, but it has bugs and we installed the V3.41 in our server. The pictures may be from the V3.5, but please download the V3.41 or you can start to use the new V3.50. Justhost had the version V3.3 and it has the full set of language codes. The full version V3.41 & V3.50 do not include all languages, just Engligh. As we tried the English only version, we couldn't use special characters for Vietnamese fonts (utf- 
. We backed up the language folder from the V3.3 and added on to the V3.41 language folder. We can use the UTF-8 now. Anyhow, justhost.com now does have the newest version V3.50. If you don't want to go through many steps, the best is to let the fantastico to install it for you automatically through the cpanel. It's very easy, just choose your directory from the root and everything and it will automatically install for you.
When you finished, make sure you fill in the email address and click send email so they can email you username/password to access nucleus in case later you forget.
***We've just finished installing V3.50, we need to fix the file, because the original one will cause the member registration finalization to fail.
***The fantastico installation won't change the permission of the file config.php to 444, we have to manually change it from 644.
***If we want the link for new member to register appear below the login form (default, it's not there), we should just modify the loginform-notloggedin.template now, we use the code for the GreyBox plugin so Greybox will activate when people click to register.
If we installed everything correctly, when we type on the Address Bar http://www.yourdomain.com/yournucleusdirectory/ your browser should display your First Blog. Now we're ready to add contents to our blog(s).
***If we have a static index.htm in the nucleus folder, everytime we edit the post, the link yoursite in the admin area will take us back to the default index.htm instead of index.php. In order to make the Yoursite link to direct us back to the index.php which is nucleus blog, we have to edit the ADMIN.php in the libs folder, line 5216 or search for _Yoursite and change
echo "<a href='".$CONF['IndexURL']."'>"._YOURSITE."</a>";
to
echo "<a href='".$CONF['IndexURL']."/index.php'>"._YOURSITE."</a>";
*If you're planning to install many separate nucleus systems on your server, we recommend to embed a full set of extra modified skins and the most used plugins with the installation package so everytime you install the nucleus, all the desired skins and plugins
will already be there. The pictures will show my modified skins and all the plugins we used for our blogs. We will always use these sets anytime we install a new nucleus blog. Now, it would take us less than 1 hour to have all blogs running with all the bells and whistles that we need... video, pictures, music player, greybox, lightbox2...
