There are many blog systems out there that are more popular and supported than NucleusCMS and many hosting websites that we can choose from, but for me, I've been using Justhost.com and NucleusCMS reliably for almost a year now. This is the tutorial on how to set up a blog using NucleusCMS system on Justhost.com in less than 30 minutes with basic videos, music and pictures fully embedded.

Preparation

A blog consist of a front page, which many blog system called themes or skins. We should browse the skins page to see which one we like and download it first. Look at a few blogs and see what we want our blogs to look like and what information needed to display on our blog. There are many types of layouts, 2 columns or 3 columns, etc. We can also edit the skins to fit our blog designs but make sure the credit for the original designer is there. So well designed skins will have to comply with all the templates needed to display contents of blogs, choose the ones that are most popular (used) and customize them to our preferences.

The next thing is to download all the plugins that we're going... ... to use, we will have to define what our blogs will show: movies, youtube, images, music, fancy popups, security, spam control, private blogs, private articles, members rights, member registration, etc. The list I have includes all the ones I think neccessary for my blogs, but you can download more if you like.

Plugins needed:

1. NP_Tinymce Editor: We need this to edit/write our posts efficiently.
2. NP_FancierULR2: This one makes the urls of our articles in our blogs easier to read.
3. NP_CatShow: This one shows the articles in a category.
4. NP_CatlistVars: This one shows how many articles are in a category.
   
5. NP_BlogIE 0.71: This one import/export (back up/restore) our articles on our blogs.
6. NP_CommentControl: This one let us to preview and approve the comments before they're can be posted (spam-advertised comments).
7. NP_Views: This one shows how many times an article has been viewed.
8. NP_DBUCounter: This one shows blog counter in details.
9. NP_Captcha: this one prevent spam-bot comments with captcha.
10. NP_Smiley: This one show emoticons on articles and comments.
11. NP_AutoExtended: This one will automatically split the article to main and extended (read more).
12. NP_BasicAuth: This one allows protection on Extended text (read more) with password.
13. NP_AccesControl: This one allows protection on blogs and articles with password-users-admin.
14. NP_Calendar: This one displays a calendar with posted dates highlighted and links in a month.
15. NP_ShowPostID: This one helps to find post id # when needed.
16. NP_NotifyMe: This one lets blogs to notify readers with new posts.
17. NP_FlashMP3: MP3 player.
18. Flowplayer: Flash video player.
19. Nonverblaster-Hover: Flash video player.
20. JWplayer: Flash video player.
21. Pop-ups: Fancy popups with overlay for all multimedia files: pictures, music, slideshows, videos, playlist, youtubes.

Zip all these downloaded plugins into 1 zip file. The best is put them all into a folder then select all of them and zip.

Zip all Skins we want to use into 1 zip file. The best is to put them all into a folder, select all then zip.

So now, we have skins and plugins that are ready to be uploaded to our website. We need to install the newest version of NucleusCMS 3.51. We believe all the hosting services should have these popular blog systems on them including NucleusCMS. At least with justhost.com that we use has it ready for us to install. Just log in to www.ourjusthostwebsite.com/cpanel with username and password and after the authentication we'll be in the control panel. Click on fantastico to see all the programs available for us to install.

Just select Nucleus and fill in all the information for the new blog we're going to create and click install. Very easy and straight forward.

Click Control Panel after clicking Send Email to see the folder on our website. Click File Manager and we should see the folder where Nucleus 3.51 has been installed. It should be under /public_html/

Click to expand the folder, we should see all the folders and files of the Nucleus 3.51

Now we need to upload skins and plugins zip file that we want to use to the system. Click to expand the skins folder and upload the skins.zip and plugins.zip that we did before in preparation.

Unzip the file to have all skins folders.

All skins folders are ready to be imported and installed in the system

Now, we need to upload the PLUGINS to our /blog/nucleus/plugins/ folder.

We should have a few standard plugins in 3.51 version in the folder already. Now we need to upload the plugins.zip file with all the plugins in it. The best is to make sure we only zip the folder+NP_xxx.php for each plugin, so when we extracted, we don't have to unzip every single pluginx.zip.

With the zip file is less than 25Mb, we can just uploaded through the control panel, it's faster IMO.

Select the plugins.zip box and click extract to extract all folders+php files for plugins and we should delete the zip file after it's done to save disk space (just a courtesy). Now we should have all folders and php file of our zipped plugins.

Now we're ready to go to our blog and start designing our pages. Open a new tab or launch a new browser window and type in our blog address: http://www.yourwebsite.com/yourblog/ and hit enter, we should see a nice yellow page.

Login with admin username and password that we selected before. Make sure to change the password to 8 characters minimum in the profile screen. After logged in, we should see the admin and add new item link on the sidebar.

Click admin and start the setting up the blog. For some reasons, they may ask to log in again, just do it.

Go to the admin page and select CONFIGURATION to set up stuff.

Configuration page: increase the size of the upload to at least 10MB = 10000000, check FancyURL if we want.

Click update when done

Now click "back to admin home", we want our page to look special, so we want to change the skin. First we need to import the skins what we uploaded before, click import/export

Select the skins in the skins folder to import to our blog.

Confirm the skin to be imported

Click import/export again to import more skins that we want to use. When all skins are imported, then we need to install plugins.

We should see all the plugins we extracted, the only way they will show up on the list is if the NP_xxx.php files are there. If we don't see the plugins, they must still be in the zip forms.

Since the FancierURL2 must be on the top of the plugins list, we should install this one FIRST, then move it up to the top of the list. I don't know why, but it just is.

Click move up to push the plugin to the top list.

For FancierURL2 to work, make sure the .htaccess file is in the blog folder.

After all the plugins are done, we now should select the skin we want to use as default for our blog. Back to admin page and select the configuration

We will see the layout of our blog changed according to the new skin selected

Now we're ready for our blog. Next how to modify color and layouts of skins. To be continued.