One Step Closer To The Edge
Geek Warning: By now you all should know what that means; it's gonna get geeky in here. As usual, if that isn't your thing please feel free to surf on over to Sun Comprehending Glass or Island Passage. You won't hurt my feelings. For the rest of you, strap on your beanie hat and break out your slide rule. It's nerd time! When last I left you I had just installed linux and was about to install Apache and PHP. I then learned that the good people at Fedora were about to release Core 4 on the 6th of June. Heck, I could wait a few more days and get the torrents for that. A few days came and went when I learned that the release was going to be pushed back another couple of weeks. I was feeling busy with other parts of my life (like the usual end-of-the-month drill at work) and decided not to worry about it too much.
Then, just a few days before the new release date a co-worker said that he had downloaded the CD images for Core 4 over the weekend. It seems (and I confirmed this from Slashdot) that one of the mirrors hosting the images was left unsecured over the weekend and lots of people ended up with 'pirate' copies before the official release. (Can one have a truly pirate copy of software that is under the GPL? Just a little something to wrap your head around while trying to fall asleep some night.)
Anyway, it took me another few days before I was finally able to sit down at my Frankenstein box and run the install but when I did I took care to include Apache, PHP and MySQL as part of the original package. This time everything went off without a hitch. And just to add some Cool Whip to the pie, since Core 4 is all new I didn't have to run an up2date or yum after I was done to upgrade anything. Shiney!
Now came the hard part: installing the content management system. For those who don't know a CMS is way to build a webpage dynamically. It uses PHP and MySQL to basically run a database report and present the results as a webpage. Each part of the page (such as a poll, blogroll, photo gallery or news item) is a node and those nodes are stored as records in the database. Take a look at Slashdot and This Week In Tech. The both use CMS tools to deliver their content. Look at them with an eye toward breaking each logical part of the page down into separate nodes (or modules if you prefer). Now store those nodes in a database and use something like MySQL to call the nodes you want to display. Take the report of nodes that MySQL gave you and use PHP to fit them in to a Cascading Style Sheet. Viola!
Go ahead, take a look at the examples the then come back. I can wait.
Now that you have a basic idea of what I am talking about you can see that the big advantage of a system like this in that it makes it easy for me as the admin to move, add or change the content very quickly. It also allows me to set up user accounts and with them permission to different things depending on who the user is. As an example I could choose to set up a public photo gallery of my scenic pictures and post a gallery of family photos that would only be visible to my family and close friends. Confused? Not to worry it took me a while to get it.
Another advantage is that I don't need to know much in the way of HTML. With all respect to my friends who work with HTML and even helped support their families with that knowledge (Stephen, I'm talking to you) I have no burning desire to get that deep in to tags and css. Having said that I do still have some css skills that I need to learn so as to customize the look of the site but for know I think I will go with one of the templates that are available out on the web for free.
This post is getting on the long side so I think I will pause the story here and tell you that the next geek post I will delve in to the strange world of trying to get the CMS installed.
