PHP MySQL Web Site Design Tools - PhpNuke PHPbb and WordPress Mambo Joomla Internet Database Publishing

June 24 2006

Mambo Website

Web Site design has gone through many changes over the decade and it appears that the database driven website is the newer iteration in this process. There have been many non-database driven programs by various makers including Microsoft and Netscape. Some of the more popular programs are FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

There are limitations to those popular programs and the next “big thing” is php driven sites using SQL as the database. PHP (stands for Personal Home Page Tools) and is an open-source reflective programming language. It was originally designed for dynamic web content and is mainly used for server-side applications.

Although the roots of PHP date back to the early 1990’s, it wasn’t until 1997 that many web designers took notice. Since then Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan Israel has overseen the development of the programming language.

PHP can be seen as an alternative to Microsofts ASP.NET, C programming and Visual Basic languages. The most common development approach is using Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (notice the acronym LAMP – Linux Apache MySQL PHP).

There are many off the shelf free PHP applications for developing websites. Some of the popular ones include phpNuke, phpBB (Bulletin Board), Wordpress (Blogging Software) to name a few. PHPNuke is probably the most popular overall website generation tool but there are others including Mambo, Joomla, and phpWebsite. If you use a PHP website generation package please contact us to add it to the list.

There are some drawbacks to PHP, most notably the vulnerability to hackers. This has been a priority for those developing PHP applications. Many of the updates are security related.

There will likely be more developers using the PHP / MySql approach to creating websites. There are already many open source modules freely available on the Internet. It will be interesting to watch.