Dominic Smith is a Senior Writer and Content Strategist. rack space digitala digital marketing infrastructure specialist.
summarize the latest comparison infographic It got me thinking about what the internet looked like before the advent of WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla open source Content Management Systems (CMS).
It’s been almost a decade since open source CMS started changing our internet experience. Essentially, a CMS builds the website development, management, and consumption experience.
Most of the content you read on the web today (including this article) is likely delivered through an open source CMS.fedex and Washington Post I am using Drupal. Coca-Cola France and Sony Music use WordPress. Harvard University and his IHOP use Joomla.
This is not to say that some of these organizations and brands also do not use sanctioned enterprise web content management systems (such as Adobe Experience Manager or Sitecore), but the continuation of systems such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Evolution (and relevance) is the power of developer collaboration around the world. they continue to hold their own. And then some.
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small beginning
Xpedio may have been the first end-to-end CMS, but Drupal was the earliest and most influential CMS. In 2000, a group of students at the University of Antwerp were frustrated by the lack of constant internet connectivity at their disposal. They built a wireless bridge, allowing 8 of them to share a single ADSL modem connection.
Along the way, they identified new problems. There was no easy way to discuss and share information. Doris Bytart I was working on a small news site with a built-in web board where friends could leave notes for each other on everything from dinner plans to network conditions.
When Dries graduated, he decided to put the site on the Web so his group of friends could keep in touch. As the software evolves, Drupal (Doppel means drop in Dutch). Over time, as global collaboration became possible, the core software evolved into his first widely adopted CMS platform.
WordPress is the next open source CMS that came out in 2003. WordPress started with his one piece of code designed to enhance the typography of everyday writing on the web. Since then, it has grown to become the world’s largest self-hosted blogging tool, used by tens of millions of people every day.
Jumura! This was the result of his Mambo code fork in 2005. This was an outpouring of developers trying to reclaim open source principles. On his website, OpenSourceMatters.org, which they created, on the first day he had over 1000 people join the open source movement.
The resulting software got its name from the anglicized spelling of Swahili. Jumurameans “all together” or “as a whole”.
Combining these three CMS platforms allows developers, bloggers, enthusiasts, and even businesses to escape the dark ages of manually converting documents to HTML and using cumbersome tools to reformat images. I made it. They created the web that we now take for granted.
early exploration
In the mid-to-late 1990s, the Internet was booming with new technology, but there were also many unstructured websites with migraine-inducing colors, erratic fonts, and incomprehensible layouts. . Every website appeared to have an avalanche of Netscape icons and neon blue links. There was also the minimalist route of an HTML table chock-full of links on a gray background.
Pioneers like 15-year-old Mark Zuckerberg built websites without many prototypes to follow.Despite the yellow-eyed “glitter” that blinked back at you, Zuckerberg’s first website considerably suppressed. If you wanted to be on “The Web,” you had to email Mark’s AOL account.
Prophetically, a high school freshman wrote on the site: Hopefully it grows into a bigger web. ”
Image from Mark Zuckberg’s website via Neatorama
The Wild West of the Internet
As with any frontier, there was some lawlessness in the early days of the Internet. Today, it’s hard to imagine a website employing a saturated bright red background for a website that humans would actually want to see.
But when it came time to design a Jackie Chan biography website in 1998, Random House did just that.I am Jackie Chan: My life in action”
via image http://www.randomhouse.com/features/iamjackiechan/
Experimenting with edgy viral content
Today, we’re bombarded with looped videos of celebrity implosion, GIFs of dogs eating burritos, and quizzes designed to reveal your inner gang.
One of the first experiments with online edgeness was strawberry pop tart blow torchstill online, last updated in August 1994.
“Shortly after that, the toaster started to emit a lot of smoke. The researchers noticed that some of their neighbors on the street were starting to get a little curious, but the experiment went on nonetheless.”
Image via www.pmichaud.com/toast
This inflammatory pseudoscience site predates BuzzFeed by a decade. Perhaps envisioning the future of viral content, the author says at the bottom of the page: In October 1994 alone, it was accessed over 2000 times. ”
The number seems almost strange at the developmental stage of the Internet, where sites like Buzzfeed are visited about 60 million times a month. But thanks to his open-source CMS software, the web not only serves billions of people in his day, it’s easier on the eyes.
Visit CMS Compare infographics for more information.
