I have tried a lot of them. One I was using up to last year is PhpNuke available at http://searchenginejournal.org. It is convenient, includes a lot of useful tools for site management. However, it contains a couple of bugs that are unwanted for SEO. For instance it always builds ugly-looking urls and has problems with putting correct titles. When I have worked on PhpNuke I spent a lot of time by tuning and adjusting it to fit my needs. I found plugins that replace page title with title of first article on this page, modules that made permanent urls and so on, but it took a lot of time to make it rolling for each new site I’ve made and I started looking for something more easy and covenient. That is how blogs became platforms for the majority of my sites.

After trying several blog scripts I have finally chosen two of them, which, I think are useful for building good sites. The first one I have tried is MT, which is available fromhttp://searchenginejournal.org. Powerfull platform for creating site. Rather easy installation and management. Good layout. Try it yourself to have your own opinion of convenience.

My second choice, which I consider to be the best choice for today is WordPress. Uptimebot is currently working on this platform and I am completely satisfied with it’s functional abilities. Of course it has lesser functions that MT and much less functions than PhpNuke, but ease of five minutes installation, attractive layout and amazingly clean code make WordPress to be the best script for building text sites, which I’d recommend for everybody, moreover that google loves blogs and this additionaly attracts me. Besides, there is a WordPress plugin that allows visitors to see when GoogleBot came for the last time – you can see it in footer of our page.

The only thing I’d like to be developed by WordPress is multi-site WordPress that would allow to build several blogs using one cpy of script (as it is possible with MT). They currently have only beta of multi-site script, but it is yet half-done and I wouldn’t recommend to use it.

Wordpress is available for download from http://searchenginejournal.org.  Enjoy it!

1. All indexed .html files must be indexed again with .php extensions.
2. All links pointing particular page will be lost, unless you report all of your link partners and site owners, who link to you (re-indexing of new links will take some time too).
3. You will lose a lot of traffic from search engines during re-indexing of the whole site will occur, even if you put an error page that will redirect surfers somewhere to your .php pages.
4. Nobody knows whether your site will return back to good positions in SERPs after it will drop out.

So, what to do if you don’t want to change file extensions for the purpose of SEO, but need to include some php code in your pages anyway? There are several methods.

The first, and the most obvious is to use mod_rewrite (in case if your server supports mod_rewrite and you have permissions to modify .htaccess file). If yes – put the following strings in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html $1\.php

Now all requested .html pages will be automatically substituted with .php pages.

Another method works with .htaccess again. Add the following string to .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm

I think that this method is the most convenient one, because it simply allows executing PHP scripts to run in .html files. If you have no access to your .htaccess file, contact your hoster and request to make appropriate modification of httpd.conf for your site.

If you were using SSI on your site, for instance like this:

Than you can replace it with the following string in your .php files:

< ? include(’file.txt’); ?>