20.1. The characteristics of the various types of blocks

There are 3 different types of PHP-Nuke blocks:

RSS/RDF: They capture news that's available from other sites in standard reading format, i.e. text (For example the site spaghettibrain has a lot of news that are at other sites' disposal).
Blocks of contents: blocks in which we insert simple text or HTML text that will be then displayed inside the block (See following example)
Blocks of files: They are PHP scripts that execute fixed commands (see Section 20.2)

In this paragraph we will see a simple example of how to insert the links and the text in a text block. If you already know a little HTML there is no point in following this example.

We suppose you want to insert a block with text and a link to 3 different sites:

The Webmaster who wrote this book manages the following sites:

The text will be formatted in this way in order to be inserted in the block (see Figure 20-2):

<B> webmaster </b> who writes  this book manages the following sites: <b ><br>
<a href="http://www.spaghettibrain.com">spaghettibrain.com</a>
<a href ="http://www.claudioerba.com">claudioerba.com</a>

Figure 20-2. Block example

Block example

Some Small HTML lessons:

<b>: It is for bold text, it opens a tag. All words that we write after this tag will be bold until </B> (which closes the tag).
<br>: It is for a page break, it does not need to be closed.
<ahref="http://siteyouwant.com">SiteName</a>: is used to open the http://siteyouwant.com.