| Use this quick-start guide
to help you set up the software you’ll need to create Blogs… or
to program in PHP… or to develop other kinds
of web-based applications on a Windows-based PC.
If your site is Linux-hosted, no problem - the
software we’ll use is available on both platforms,
so you can develop on Windows and upload to run
on Linux. And best of all, it’s free! 
The Apache
Server is one of the principal elements which can help you design applications
on your PC using Windows for deployment on the
Web using Linux
|
There is now a huge range of
Open Source software programmed using PHP. Code written in the PHP language can be embedded
directly into a web page. Just before each page is displayed
on screen, a processing program interprets the PHP code
and replaces it with HTML. The resulting page may combine
design elements read in from one or more HTML and CSS
(Cascading Style Sheet) files, plus data stored in separate
files or in a database. In this way, style (the page
layout) and the content (the data) may be stored independently
and combined on-the-fly when pages are viewed.
This technique has proven to be useful for the creation
of all kinds of internet and intranet applications such
as advertising management systems, collaborative books
or ‘Wikis’, shopping carts and internet discussion
forums.
Many of these applications are loosely described as
Content Management Systems (CMS). Some CMSes are aimed
at fulfilling specific functions - for example, creating
Web logs or ‘Blogs’. Others may contain numerous
interlinked features for the creation of anything from
a multi-author book to an entire interactive community
with discussion forums, polls, online shopping and more.
From WAMP To LAMP...
Sometimes a CMS may call itself a ‘portal’.
This is not a precise term and means different things
to different people. In a broad sense, a portal can be
thought of as an online collaborative community. Just
remember that a CMS that calls itself a portal is likely
to have more features (and will probably, therefore,
be more complicated to set up and manage) than one that
calls itself a Blog.
We shall be looking in more detail at various types
of CMS in the coming months. For now, however, let’s
consider what you will need in order to use one of these
systems. In most cases you will require a minimum of
an operating system running a web server and a programming
(or ‘scripting’) language capable of generating
or modifying HTML pages. Typically (though not invariably)
you will also need a database server.
There are many possible candidates to fulfil each of
these functions. A common combination provided by web
hosting services is the Linux operating system, the Apache
web server, the MySQL database and the PHP language.
For short, this combination is sometimes called LAMP.
But when developing your CMS project, it is often more
convenient to do so on your desktop PC rather than having
to keep uploading files for testing to your web host.
Your PC is more likely to be running Windows than Linux.
Fortunately, the same combination of server, database
and programming software is available for Windows, in
which case it is called WAMP - Windows, Apache, MySQL
and PHP. Incidentally, the same acronym is also used
by programmers who favour the Perl or Python languages.
In fact, PHP is the most commonly used language for Open
Source CMS development and so that’s the one we
shall stick to for the time being.
First Install The Software...
If you want to get started with local PHP development
on your PC, refer to our installation
guides to:
See also: Our Introduction To CMS
October 2005
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