Content Management
| April 3, 2010 | Posted by Dan under web |
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WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, TikiWiki
I am amazed at the contribution many dedicated developers have made to provide some of the best CMS and Blogging packages available.
I loved watching them mature from clunky, table based systems to secure, flexible, high performance, modular, commercial quality systems
The Old Days
When Mozilla, the first browser came out closely followed by Netscape, I coded everything by hand in HTML. Since I was into Unix System Administration at Oracle at the time, I waited on the edge of my seat for Dan Farmer’s hideously named network security analysis program called Satan. I quickly became familiar with how HTML code could be generated in Perl and other languages.
Later, I discovered I could monitor all my systems in Oracle’s Enterprise Systems Center via the web. So, I took measurements and colors of all y systems and coded them into Pov-Ray to generate a life-like ray traced image of our data center. Then, I used that image to develop an internal website for giving real-time statistics on our sysems by clicking on the picture.
I got a laugh when people looked puzzled and asked where I was standing when I took the photograph.
NoDivorces – Migration from Static to Dynamic Websites
In 2001, after leaving Clickmarks to take care of my family during my struggles with divorce, I developed a website called NoDivorces.com.
For years, I used NetObjects as it allowed me to focus on design and content rather than technical details. Still, good SEO required moving away from tables and into CSS. I also found it cumbersome to develop database driven websites that way.
Enter Content Management
finding static website development limiting, I began using various Content Management Systems for my blogs and websites. Initially, I worked with PHP-Nuke, then explored the world of CMS systems including Postnuke, B2evolution, mambo, xoops, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and TikiWiki.
The nukes used tables to position elements on the screen, and therefore it was difficult to keep the prime content high up in the document for SEO.
B2evolution seemed to be a great improvement over PHP-Nuke and PostNuke offering multiple blogs with tabs along the top for selecting them. In addition search engine friendly URLs (SEFURLs) could be customized.
Mambo merged with Joomla, and Joomla seemed to be more user friendly–a beginner’s CMS, and a quite powerful one at that. So, I took some time to master it and ran a few websites on it.
But I wanted to explore the Wiki’s a bit. For awhile we used one at US Script for documenting and communicating between staff. So I read up on the pros and cons and settled on TikiWiki for some of my websites. I stayed with it from TikiWiki 3 through 6 and then found it too cumbersome to maintain sites on Drupal, WordPress, TikiWiki, and Joomla at the same time. So, I began to migrate the rest of my sites to Drupal and WordPress.
C-Panel and Virtual Private Systems
During these years, I hosted my sites on Plesk or C-Panel hosts settling on a reseller’s account on C-Panel. However, I longed for the comfort of an old, familiar Linux prompt. Being an old time Unix hack (system architect), I found it limiting to be confined to a C-panel. I wanted to see the ownership of files. I wanted to be free to fire off a pipeline of commands at the Unix prompt using sed, awk, grep, sort, uniq, find, xarg, or anything else. I loved being able to set up an APC cache or memcached.
Drupal: Multiple Sites, Single Installation
After running updates on about 20 WordPress and Drupal installations on a regular basis, it became second-nature but time consuming and boring. But, since I now had a VPS, I could put all my Drupal sites into one installation. I believe I could have done that under C-panel as well but it was much nicer under my VPS.
By using prefixing, I could store all the Drupal based websites into a single database or split them into separate databases. I could limit various sites to specific themes or modules, or I could make certain themes or modules available to all sites.
WordPress: Multiple Sites, Single Installation
When I set up the Drupal sites into a single installation, I seriously considered converting all my WordPress sites to Drupal since WordPress did not have a good multi-site and domain mapping solution at the time. However, the multi-site feature matured a bit under WordPress 2.9 until it was rock solid under 3.0 and above. And about the time 3.0 came out, the domain mapping plugin matured. This gave me the ability to map other domains into subdomains I had created in my main WordPress installation.
However, many administrators had difficulty setting up Domain Mapping, so I helped a few for awhile.
