Benefits of Content Management Systems to Dynamic Web Programming

One of the most ground-breaking benefits of dynamic web programming is content management systems that can make internet life for content editors much easy and their work more attractive visually.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of an editor of an online newspaper or magazine. You are creative in your writings and know a lot about the content you write about. Nevertheless, these skills on their own aren’t sufficient to be able to function in an online “news” source. You must at least possess the very basic knowledge on the functions and the tags of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). You must also be able to create codes for the presentations of your articles. This procedure of writing web articles can be quite frustrating and tiring to you, if you haven’t ever heard about CMS’s (Content Management Systems).

Content Management Systems are very much like personal automated web page authors. You compose your articles, surveys, and rating systems as if you are making use of a word processor or a visual editing program. Motivated by the data you put in, the CMS will store all of these in a database and will then translate them into HTML. CMS basically acts like a translator between you and the browsers through the creation of very user friendly graphical interfaces.

More generally, CMS have a front-end and a back-end. The front-end clearly refers to the face of the site that each visitor can see. The back-end is the user-friendly graphical interface where you can modify your content or the template using the help of the many wizards that these systems supply. Let’s imagine that you need to write a code for a user-upload function in the site, or a survey system that would make it possible for users to vote on your articles; you won’t even require to use Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or any kind of HTML editor; as there are already hundreds of modules that are written for different CMS’s. All you need to do is just download the module to your server and install it.

There are many online CMS systems which are presented as freeware. Nevertheless, here are two suggestions for other user groups;

Typo3: If you think you are professional enough and think you can deal with some PHP coding, this sturdy and very flexible system is just for you.

Mambo: If you prefer not to deal with PHP coding, and prefer to work on it as a hobby, then Mambo should be your choice as it doesn’t require the user to change much and is already supported by many ready-to-install modules and templates.

In conclusion, CMS can make our lives a lot more easy then before whilst making our sites a lot more attractive. They are the “operating systems”, personal coders and free translators of the web.


Professional Commercial Sites Now Use PHP

PHP is one of the most popular dynamic web programming languages which you see in most of the websites which require you to sign in with your username to a site, vote in a poll, download or upload something or even while you are using the shopping cart of an online shop. It is the main language for most of the sites that are professionally written for commercial purposes.

Unlike HTML, PHP is much closer to the basic programming languages like C or even like JAVA. However, calling PHP a programming language would be a huge mistake because it was originally written in C and then developed into a server technology by a college student called Rasmus Lerdorf. Actually, his first intention was just to create a small script to track hits on his “Home Page” and yet, it became the most popular open source in the Internet world. Furthermore, the name PHP comes from HP of “Home Page” and P of “Personal” and “Portable”.

With PHP, users can also do variety of programming; from a simple “Hello World” script to a very detailed shopping system. Its great simplicity and maintainability separates this code from its competitors; JSP (Java Server Pages) and ASP of Microsoft. Knowing this fact, most of the Internet web space suppliers can build their servers with Apache (Linux) so that their clients can be able to work with PHP instead of Windows based ASP. PHP being a derivative of C is associated with Linux which does also supply the user with another useful companion of PHP; MySQL database server.

Some people can say that PHP is just the “free” version of ASP (Microsoft’s Active Server Pages); so in other words, ASP for the poor but this is not the case. ASP, as most of the products of Microsoft Hegemony, doesn’t let the user do any further setting then it is allowed in the installation software. Everything is done automatically and almost nothing is left to the initiative of the user. Whereas most of the things are manual in PHP, in order to install the PHP/Apache/Linux triplets you really have to know what you are doing and also have to work on them.

Apart from the flexibility of this technology, it is also extremely stable because it uses Linux which is a modular operating system which means that it opens a new module for each and every function that you try to use. In the end, you really don’t want to have a server which cannot support you for 24/7. The most intriguing feature of PHP is that it can connect to MySQL database or SQL 2000 server using its own open source libraries developed for the users and by the users. These connections also function without using ODBC which is slow because it is a mediator between your code and the database. PHP directly interacts with the database bypassing this middle burden therefore giving you tremendous clock enhancements.

PHP is the basic tool for you to follow the path towards becoming a web programmer and create your own, sophisticated, nicely coded, interactive internet pages. Use PHP if you want to be in total control of your server and really want to know what is going on.
