Nucleus CMS is an open-source blog management software package written in PHP, with a MySQL backend, primarily written and maintained by Wouter Demuynck. It is used to manage frequently-updated Web content. With a little tweaking (mainly to skins) it might be considered a lightweight content management system, although there is no facility to upload file types other than graphic files to be displayed within the blog pages.

Nucleus makes use of a callback function which has led to a plugin system that has inspired somewhere in the order of 50 to 100 distinct plugins. The general drive within the development community is that functionality should exist as plugins as totally as possible. This philosophy has led to a relatively light and uncluttered base install.

Blog:CMS is a (currently less stable) fork of Nucleus CMS with several plugins pre-installed and a number of other projects added in. Thus NucleusCMS plugins (on the whole) will work on this fork.

It is included in Fantastico, available via many domains’ cPanel.

Methodologies

NucleusCMS uses a database to store content which is manipulated by a number of classes. These classes fall into two groups, core and plugin. The core contains the basic functionality including a callback system which is used to trigger plugins. By default NucleusCMS comes with just one plugin as standard (two from version 3.3). This is in line with the general philosophy that the system should be as light as possible.

The output is rendered using a custom two layer substitution based template and skin system. Templates generally provide the form for iterated content (such as listings) whereas the structure is provided by what are called skins. Skins are divided up by type (index, item, archive, archives, user, error, search (and custom with 3.3)) and are specified separately to each other. Include files can be used to reduce repetition of common elements.

API

Nucleus CMS supports a number of common blog oriented API through the use of an XML-RPC library.

• Movable Type API
• metaWeblog API
• The Blogger API