Richard Forth wrote:
PS What exactly is Joomla? Is it simialr to Apache? Or am I way off?
Apache is a web server. (There are many alternatives, although Apache is
the most common and one of the most flexible.) It's job is to sit there
waiting for requests from web browsers (Firefox, IE, etc) and when it
gets a request locates the information requested and sends it. In the
simple case this just means someone has the raw HTML of their web pages
sat on the server and Apache just finds the file and sends it verbatim.
This works well for small "static" sites, ie ones which don't change.
For "dynamic" sites, where some work has to be done before there is
something to send back to the browser, Apache relies on other programs
to generate the response - Apache tells the program what the browser
asked for, the program generates an appropriate response, and Apache
sends it back to the browser. Which program that is depends on lots of
things (and can sometimes, but not always, be determined by looking at
the web page address: something ending .php will use the PHP program,
.asp will use Microsoft's scripting language, etc). As well as PHP there
are many other scripting languages you'll probably have heard of: Java,
Perl, Python, etc. It is also possible to write the programs in more
traditional languages like C.
PHP is a scripting language that is relatively easy to use and is
specifically designed for generating web pages, and is very good and
pulling data from databases (eg MySQL) and incorporating that data into
the response it gives back to Apache. Writing a web site from scratch
using PHP is certainly possible (it's a large part of what I do for a
living). On the other hand, not only are Apache and PHP open source, but
there are lots of open source PHP applications (ie sets of scripts
written using PHP) that you can download and use freely.
One such PHP script is Joomla, which is a "content management system"
(CMS). When you view a site using Joomla, it loads templates designed by
the site owner, collects the right information from the database, and
inserts that into the template and sends out the response. What makes it
a CMS is that it also has "hidden" web pages (only accessible to the
site owner and other authorised people) which allow him to change the
content without knowing anything about PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc So once
installed, the whole site is administered via web browsers. There are
many other CMS packages, many of them also open source (Drupal, Mambo
(on which Joomla was based), PostNuke, etc).
Hope that explains how it all fits together. It's obviously simplified
in several areas, so if anyone wants to be pedantic I'm sure they can
pull it pieces!
--
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555
Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
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