History of WordPress CMS

Since year 2000, there have been various technological revolutions that have taken great importance in the evolution of Information Technology (IT) and the Internet. However, in the year 2004, the revolution took a shape that had begun to take shape several years ago, and it was finally known as the Web 2.0 revolution, a concept that was created in 2004 by one of the co-founders Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media, referring to the remarkable changes that were creating Internet and the World Wide Web.

Historically, most of the web content on Internet is created by companies and organizations having various websites and much more minority of enthusiastic users of the Internet. They possessed the necessary knowledge and used the web as a way of to share information. But content generation or Internet publication remained complicated and many users simply used the Internet and the Web to consult and seek information.

Around the early 2000s, companies began to appear who developed web services with a different philosophy, based on participation and ability to share information that users created. This phenomenon can be found in the services such as Bloggers, who had explosive growth. The success was tremendous and any user could create their own website in minutes and start publishing content that was available for other Internet users. One of the most successful services related to the creation of Blogs was the Blogger, which was created by Pyra Labs, a tiny company in San Francisco and was acquired by Google in 2003.

At that time and in parallel with the creation of multiple services and platforms, development of the WordPress web application began, which was an incredible success with the launch of its first version in May 2003.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source software and known as the most successful content management system and a blogging software written in PHP and based on MySQL database for creating blogs and websites for all kinds of organizations, companies and millions of individuals. The WordPress software is also the origin of the service WordPress.com and is available to download for free under the terms of GNU GPL. In the contest of Best CMS which was held in 2007, WordPress got 1st place in the category of “Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System”.

WordPress lets multiple authors to issue tickets, which are classified according to date and category. Also, it consists of external links management, trackbacks, and a fine management reviews. Moreover, to that of the more minor such as typographic filters, multilingual interface and a system of permanent links are possible. WordPress has an ability and capability to import bulk content from many other CMS such as Blogger, Movable Type and Textpattern and also allows export of syndication feeds in RSS format. In addition, WordPress totally respects web standards XHTML and CSS and have utilized it in the development of WordPress.

The simplicity of WordPress, ability to grow and improve its functionality easily, as well as other features like template system, its robustness, the use of standards and continuous improvement are the things that fueled the growth of WordPress. Also, the versions that are published regularly, along with a community of developers and a company that supports and carry out maintenance are also a part of the WordPress growth.

Because of the many features it offers, it has become blogging software for more advanced users, with less knowledge of content management systems. Despite its clear interface, the large amount of menus and options in configuration may put off the novice users. It can help advanced users to improve the functionality of their blogs and convert them into a real e-commerce shop, a portfolio, a brochure site, through optimization, etc.

Today, the WordPress community has become so active that it has a growing number of resources such as themes and plugins ready for use, documentation and translation software.

The real achievement of WordPress is based on an application developed from the usability, design and functionality that can extend completely through its 24,573 plugins including free and paid. Currently, WordPress is offered in two different ways, it is offered as a service via its wordpress.org site, in which users can create their own blog in minutes. On the other hand, it is offered as a web application which is downloadable on a web server with any web host.

In the following image, you can see a graph of Google Trends of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal along with Blogger.

As shown in the graph above, as Joomla, Drupal, and Blogger have stopped growing since late 2009, but WordPress has continued to increase and is still increasing rapidly.

On the official website of WordPress.com you can view statistics of WordPress service, which indicates that there are currently over 63,906,962 websites running on WordPress on their own mode of service.

Following are some data derived from the official WordPress site, which will give you an idea of the current use of WordPress and its rate of evolution:

• Over 64 million websites running on WordPress.
• Over 377 million people view more than 4.1 billion pages each month.
• WordPress.com users produce about 49.3 million new posts and 50.7 million new comments each month.
• Provides around 1,747 themes and 24,573 plugins ready to use.
• Leading websites running on WordPress: TechCrunch, TED, CNN, National Football League, NBC Sports, Gigaom, CBS Radio and many more!
• WordPress blogs written in over 120 languages. Top 10 languages are listed below:

1. English 66%
2. Spanish 8.7%
3. Portuguese 6.5%
4. Indonesian 3.5%
5. Italian 2%
6. German 1.8%
7. French 1.4%
8. Russian 1.1%
9. Vietnamese 1.1%
10. Swedish 1.0%

Today, WordPress have become one of the best management systems most importantly for content, which is used by millions of individuals as well as all types of organizations and companies, be it a small or large.

WordPress is the best CMS, but when it comes to build a website it becomes harder for a beginner to choose the best WordPress hosting service provider. Hence, in order to facilitate the beginners I have created a post: Criteria for Selecting the Best WordPress Hosting Provider.

If you are a beginner, make sure you take advantage of the information provided and choose that best suits to your requirements.

History of Joomla CMS

On the origins of the WWW or World Wide Web, pages that were designed were static in nature and really simple, the language on which HTML2 rested, did not allow much to do. If you had to make any changes, you were required to edit the code for each page individually. Given this, it is possible to get an idea of the work that would modify such sixty pages. Many developers and manufacturers identified this problem and create the 90 programming languages “server side” as ASP 3 or PHP4, which together with the use of data bases that would allow the dynamic generation of web pages. This opened a way for the development of the first content management systems or CMS (Content Management System).

Using a CMS then is sued by companies or organizations that need a high volume of publications and web content updates as magazines, newspapers, etc… As far as the mid-90s begin to appear, the first managers of commercial content and in some cases, custom designed for each organization and that, because of cost, were only accessible by large companies or businesses.

Since 2000, with the evolution of the WWW into portals with more and more need for user interaction, the proliferation of content management becomes more noticeable and in addition to existing commercial solutions begin to appear as the first content managers of open source (Open Source) GPL5 licensed as PHP or Mambo7, Nuke6 and many others.

Well, on September 22, 2005 after a conflict of interest related to the type of license of Mambo, the first version of Joomla 1.0 was released as a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 which included various bugs and security fixes. After then, Joomla started gaining popularity and acquired one of the best places among top CMS under GNU General Public License.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is one of the top widely used and an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build a website as well as creating powerful online applications. The simplicity of use, both in the installation and management of Joomla has been one of the key factors for diffusion, especially when implementing portals for both large companies and individual users. It is an open source solution which is available for download to anyone.

The main asset of Joomla is that it easily permits you to edit the content of a website. Joomla is an open source application developed mostly in PHP under a GPL license. The Joomla CMS can work on work on Internet, intranet and need a MySQL database and an Apache HTTP server to function.

The management of the project Joomla is delegated to the main group (“Core Team”). All the members of this Core Team work together and are committed to lead Joomla within the open source movement. This group is a combination of various profiles, with different experiences and a diverse array of disciplines.

The “Core Team” group was established when the rapid growth of Joomla in 2005 was experienced. The main group is more to an assembly of developers, and their main responsibility lies in the organization regarding its functional structure and not just in developing the content management system.

Today, the Joomla project is made up of several groups that are formed to enhance the knowledge that Joomla offers. Each group has their own aim and focuses on a specific aspect of Joomla, which is essential for the expansion and development. The main group cannot be involved in a discussion of these issues; hence there is an alternate leader in each of these groups who needs to communicate directly with the main group.

There is an essential communication channel provided by the working groups for the large communities of Joomla and the main group so that to bring all the concerns to light involved by changes and extension of information.

Joomla – Related Industry

Open Source Matters Inc. (OSM) is a non-profit organization formed under the United States and New York state law providing organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla! open-source project. It has been incorporated as a non-profit organization in New York in order to make sure that the Joomla and its future projects persist to exist beyond the involvement of individual volunteers.

Joomla Project

For the group of Open Source solutions, Joomla is free software available for the development of the multiple fronts which is using different forms of communication such as: meetings via IRC, forums, mailing lists, Wikis and blogs.

The Joomla guidelines are set with its core focus to resolve the requirements of all those who participate in one form or another in the project.

Supported Platforms

Since Joomla is based on PHP and MySQL, you can install and run it on any platform and server supporting PHP and MySQL such as Linux and Windows.

What can be done with Joomla Software?

Today, Joomla is used all over the world and is fit to build various types and sizes of websites and applications. Following are some of the real examples of what Joomla! can do.

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

Type of addons, web developers can create with Joomla:

• Inventory control systems
• Data reporting tools
• Application bridges
• Custom product catalogs
• Integrated e-commerce systems
• Complex business directories
• Reservation systems
• Communication tools

Like many others, Joomla CMS has one more potential and that is the large number of extensions programmed and developed by its user community. This helps to increase the possibilities of Joomla with new features that can be effortlessly integrated into it. Currently, Joomla is serving 6192 extensions to their community users.

Some of the Top Rated and Popular Joomla Extensions are:

• VirtueMart
• Googlemaps Plugin
• Akeeba Backup
• AcyMailing Starter
• Attachments
• Admin Tools
• jQuery Easy
• Modules Anywhere
• Tabs
• Component Creator
• JFBAlbum
• Latestweets
• Asynchronous Google Analytics Plugin
• Custom CSS

Types of Joomla Extensions

These extensions are further divided into five different types, which are:

• Components
• Modules
• Templates
• Plug ins
• Languages

Popular sites running on Joomla CMS:

• MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking)
• IHOP (Restaurant chain)
• Harvard University (Educational)

There were many new content management systems available in the market, however in comparison with Drupal and Blogger, a rapid growth of Joomla was seen in the trends. Below is the graph of Google Trends for Joomla, Drupal and Blogger.

As shown in the graph above, Joomla CMS is one of the most widely used content management system as compare to Drupal and Blogger.

Similar to many other popular web applications, you can run Joomla on a LAMP stack. Today, many web hosts offers Joomla Hosting with an easy-to-use control panels such as cPanel for Linux and Plesk for Windows that allow for automatic installation of Joomla script.

Joomla enjoys great support on the web from web hosting providers that specialize in or support it. There are many resources available on Internet, which offers information on installing and maintaining Joomla sites. BODHost blog is one of those best resources for various information about Joomla CMS.

PHP is one of the most widely-used server-side scripting languages for creating dynamic web pages and web applications. Some of the most popular web applications including forums, e-commerce shopping applications, content management systems and blogging applications are developed using the PHP programming language. PHP is incredibly easy and simple to learn but has a huge array of features for the most complex applications you’d need to create. A few prominent examples of popular PHP applications include WordPress, being one of the largest blogging software used in the world; phpBB, a popular bulletin board software and Joomla, a popular content management system (CMS) developed in PHP (among others).

PHP originally started as a simple set of tools for web developers to be able to use in order to automate and simplify certain tasks. Although originally, Rasmus released PHP as the “Personal Home Page Tools”; and it had. very limited and basic functionality and were originally simply a set of Perl scripts for his personal website. However, later on he rewrote those Perl scripts as CGI binaries in the C language with more features including the ability to process form input and a few other things – and he had renamed the language toolkit to “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter”, commonly shortened at the time as “PHP/FI”. The first version of PHP/FI, version 1.0, did have some basic features that are still common to PHP today, including variables (that has syntax similar to that of Perl), dynamic form handling, and could (as it can today) have HTML embedded in the PHP file.

In 1997, Zeev and Andi, at Technion IIT (a public research university in Israel) rewrote the PHP parser, and PHP 3 came with some useful new features; one of which being basic support for object oriented programming – and until PHP 5, object oriented programming support in PHP wasn’t favourable in comparison to other languages; especially considering PHP 3 and PHP 4 essentially had partial support for all of the models in object oriented programiprogramming, such as visibility of methods and class-level properties/variables only being available since PHP version 5. Object oriented programming is a programming and development model in which code logic is separated into different methods and with features in object oriented programming such as inheritance, abstract classes and more; it can make application development easier especially for large-scale applications.

PHP 5 also introduced PHP Data Objects, a simple, object-oriented way to interact with database systems. It’s similarly an alternative to using the standard database functions such as mysql_query() for MySQL databases and pg_query() for PostgreSQL databases.

Interesting (and useful) features in PHP

Even though PHP is designed for the creation of web applications, it has plenty of interesting and useful features, including:

Dynamically creating images.

You can dynamically create images using PHP by simply writing PHP code. – images are drawn using the Graphics Draw (GD) library. An image is then rendered by PHP saved to the server.

Compression.

You can compress files using PHP to various compression formats, including .zip, .rar and .bz2.

Password strength.

You can check the strength of passwords using built-in PHP functions – there is a cryptography extension Crack that allows you to test the strength of a password.

PhpMychat is a chat room, which is based on PHP or MYSQL script. If users have VPS hosting and they want to install this php based chat room, then they can go through the following steps :

1. Open the link : http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmychat/

2. Download : phpMyChat-Plus_1.93_full.zip

3. Enter the directory where the users want to install that particular filed. The users have to keep in mind that the directory must be the top-level directory on his or her website.

4. Specify the database:
mysql_setpermission
Name of database :
Username :
Yes to password :yes
Enter Password :
Confirm Password :
Host :localhost
Yes to create :yes
Create Another :no
Exit :0

5. Go to browser and open http://domainname.com/chat/setup.php3 (Users have to keep in mind that they have to replace http://domainname.com name with their own domain name.

6. Click on the GO option for auto setup.

7. Users have to fill the particular information in database :
host=localhost,
database name=yourdatabasename,
username=
password=

8. Click on the GO option for auto setup.

9. Fine Tuning Options: Users have to select their preferred option and then have to click on “OK” button.

10. Go To Admin Area : Users have to login to their admin area with their own username and password.

11. After login, users have to copy and paste the produced text file with in their preferable text editor.

12. Using the login and password for the database the users can edit that text file.

13. After edit, save that text file with the following name : config.lib.php3

14. Transfer the text file to the below mentioned folder : /home/username/public_html/chat/config/

15. The installation process is done. Chatroom is ready to use.

16. Users can browse the following links : http://domainname.com /
http://domainname.com/phpMyChat.php3

The “Alternative PHP Cache” (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. It was designed to provide a free framework, open and robust for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. It is known that APC should normally be included an alternatively in php icon wink Alternative PHP Cache.

We should use it to optimize the access of portals, and it is true that the improvement is really important!

Here is a small howto explaining how to install an APC on debian with php4.

First you need to install PEAR
apt-get install apache2
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php4
apt-get install php-pear
apt-get install php4-dev
apt-get install make
pecl install apc

You must install the mod pre-fork as well. Otherwise apache2-prefork-dev will show an unnecessary error, “Sorry, not able to successfully run APXS. ”

You must copy the file / usr / share / php / apc.php and make it available via a web interface, eg / var / www / htdocs /
And you must edit the file to include a password
vi / var/www/apache2-default/apc.php
To change this password you must change these values:
defaults (‘ADMIN_USERNAME’, ‘user’) / / Admin Username
defaults (‘ADMIN_PASSWORD’, ‘password’) / / Admin Password – Change to Enable this..

Then you must edit the php.ini file and add this:
extension = apc.so
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 1024
apc.max_file_size = 1024000

apc.enabled enable or disable APC. It is a default
apc.shm_segments is the number of memory segments to allocate for the cache. It is a default.
apc.shm_size is the size of each shared memory segment in MB. This must be paid according to the machines capabilities and needs.
apc.max_file_size prevents large files from being cached.

It is possible to clear the cache by authenticating and clicking on ‘Clear Cache opcode ”

And experience the greatly improved performance with alternative PHP Cache.