The well-known CMS (content management system) open source software PHPnuke 7.x has come a long way to reach a level of maturity. But nowadays it seems somehow infected by Micro*s*ft attitude: "more is better".

The maker of PHPnuke 7.7 & up seems not to realize how much WYSIWYG editors are NOT the kind of editors loved or used by website developers. In fact : they hate that kind of annoying "user friendly" crap that messes up their HTML code. And so do I.

Even worse, PHPnuke’’s WYSIWYG editor has even a "cleanup messy HTML" button ! In other words, they admit that their WYSIWYG editor messes up HTML code ! And it doesn’t even clean-up nicely.

Their config.php file says something about

# $advanced_editor: On/Off the advanced WYSIWYG text editor for admins
# 0: Off, will use the default simple text editor
# 1: On, will use the full featured text editor
 

Okay, so I put
 

$advanced_editor: 0;
 

Right ?
Wrong ! PHPnuke completley ignores this setting because that WYSIWYG editor still shows up all over the place.

Now I went on "hackventures" and noticed that the usual admin and user modules (those index.php files) do not check on whether WYSIWYG editor is wanted or not. I am talking about version 7.8 at this point in time.

So if you want to GET RID of PHPNUKE WYSIWYG editor, having all the wonderful features of phpNuke 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 8.0 without WYSIWYG editor ? Here is how :

The string
 

define(\’NO_EDITOR\’, TRUE);
 

says that the WYSIWYG editor gets switched off. This string should be placed in for example index.php files of the modules Content, News, and also in the messages.php, to make sure you won’t get to see the WYSIWYG editor ever again :

BEFORE – for ADMIN MODULES :

if (!defined(\’ADMIN_FILE\’)) {
die (\"Access Denied\");
}
 

AFTER – for ADMIN MODULES :

if (!defined(\’ADMIN_FILE\’)) {
die (\"Access Denied\");
}
define(\’NO_EDITOR\’, TRUE);
 

BEFORE – for USER MODULES :

if (!defined(\’MODULE_FILE\’)) {
die (\"You can\’t access this file directly…\");
}
 

AFTER – for USER MODULES :

if (!defined(\’MODULE_FILE\’)) {
die (\"You can\’t access this file directly…\");
}
define(\’NO_EDITOR\’, TRUE);
 

May I wish you Happy PHPnuking !