Tag: Dynamic Websites

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CMS LAMP PHP TUTORIALS WEB SERVER WORDPRESS

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a software tool that one can use to create a website with ease. WordPress is often also called a Content Management System or CMS for short, because it provides a set of tools and user friendly interface to manage the website and its contents, like creating new posts, delete posts, add new users, remove existing users, change the style of the website etc.

Wordpress Logo

The ease at which one can create a website and manage it, without its user needing to have any technical knowledge or programming language makes WordPress one of the most popular website development and CMS software of choice.

Just how easy is it to use WordPress for website development?


In order to create a new website using WordPress, the creator is not required to have any programming background. There are several web hosting providers such as Namecheap, GoDaddy etc who provide web hosting services with One-Click WordPress installers built into their user’s Control Panel.

So, by just clicking a button, a user will be able to create a simple WordPress website. Of course a little bit of configuration needs to be done to ensure that the domain name that the user wants to use with the website is done. However, this is pretty straight forward and the web hosting providers do provide with sufficient tutorials and documentations on how to do this so it should not really be a bottleneck for non technical first time creator of a WordPress website.

How much does the WordPress software tool cost?

WordPress is an open source website development and CMS tool that is made available for free to its users. So, there is no cost one has to pay for using WordPress to create a website.

However having said that, a website needs to be stored in a web server and be made available to its users across the world. This web server will then be serving your WordPress web pages on the internet to its users throughout the day. This process is actually called as “Web Hosting“.

Theoretically, one can use your own computer to run (aka host) your website, but then you will need to ensure your computer is always switched on, connected to the internet and also not slowing down at any point in time. This means, you will not be able to use your computer for any other tasks that will slow down your computer.

So to avoid that, one will need to rent out a web server from any one of the various WordPress web hosting service providers. By doing so, the responsibility of ensuring that the website’s uptime i.e. your WordPress website’s web server is up and running 24/7 throughout the year will be taken care by those WordPress web hosting service providers.

Even though it may cost you a little bit to host your WordPress site on a 3rd party web hosting service providers, It is still considered a very good business decision to outsource such tasks to the service providers as then you can focus on your specific business growth activities knowing that your website’s uptime will never be compromised.

So now that we have a brief introduction to what a WordPress software tool is, we will just briefly discuss about some technical details of the WordPress. While a non technical person need not have to know any programming aspects of WordPress, having a little bit of introduction to what WordPress itself is made up of can be useful when he needs to get some technical help from any person in the future.

What is the Programming language used in WordPress?

WordPress is a PHP programming language based Content Management System (CMS). It is one of the most popular CMS used across the world. It powers more than 30% of the websites on the internet, and as a result of this popularity, it is often also the most targeted platform by hackers to try to find and exploit WordPress’s vulnerability. So one has to ensure that he keeps his WordPress website always updated with any security patches released by WordPress community.

What is the software stack used in WordPress?

While in the previous section, we described WordPress as a CMS written using PHP programming language, it also makes use of other additional technologies. These technologies clubbed together are often called as a software stack.

WordPressContent Management System (CMS) is primarily made of LAMP stack. LAMP stack stands for Linux, Apache, MySQl and PHP stack, where each of these components of the stack serves a specific purpose.

While we will discuss about each of these components of a WordPress stack in greater detail in future articles, here is a brief description of what each of this LAMP stack of WordPress stands for:

Linux – Linux is the Operating System that the webserver runs on.

Apache – Apache is the Web Server on which WordPress will typically run on.

MySQL – MySQL is the name of the database which is typically used by WordPress to store any website data as well as its content itself.

PHP – PHP is the programming language used to write WordPress software.

If you have read up to this point, you should now be having a decent understanding of what a WordPress software tool is, got an introduction to some new terminologies like CMS, Apache, MySQL, PHP etc.

In the future articles, we will start taking a deeper look into each of these components that make up a WordPress website, what their primary roles are in the functioning of WordPress, how their performance matters for the performance of your WordPress website as a whole and much more.

If you have any doubts after going through this article, or would like me to cover any specific point in more detail regarding WordPress, do leave a comment on this post below and I will make sure to discuss with you further on those topics.

See you in the next article!

Categories
STATIC WEBSITES TUTORIALS

Getting started with Pelican: One click installer to install Pelican

Logo Of Pelican Static Website Generator
Pelican Static Website Generator

Pelican is a Python based static website generator written in Python. Using Pelican, one can start creating static websites that can later be deployed to a simple file web server on the cloud. Some of the cloud web service providers include Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, Vultr etc. One can also host these static websites on a static host providers such as Netlify, Contentful etc. But first, lets understand more about static websites and how to use Python’s Pelican to create your static website.

What is a static website and why should you use one?

The internet today is made up of both dynamic websites as well as static websites. A dynamic website is one which usually consists of a database and the server creates dynamic html web pages on the fly, usually specific to the user who requested it. On the contrary, a static website is made up of contents that are just that – static and is served as the same to all its requesting users.

So which one should you be using for your usecase? A static website or a dynamic website? To answer this question, you should first look into this article that discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a static vs dynamic website.

So with the above introduction, its time to move into the technical aspects of Pelican. First let us discuss about the installation aspect of Pelican.

How To Install Pelican

Jump to the end of this article if you just want a one click installer to install and try Pelican

In order to install Pelican, you need to have both pip and Python installed on your system. If you dont have them installed, you can do so using the following commands:

For Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip

For Fedora Linux

sudo yum install python3 python3-pip

In this installation process, we are using Python 3 version. However note that Pelican works on both Python 2.7 as well as latest version of Python 3, so which one to use is solely left to your discretion.

Once Python and Pip are installed, we can proceed with installing Pelican onto our computers. To do so, we issue the following command:

pip3 install pelican markdown

We can note here that we are installing two Python packages from pip, one is the Pelican static site generator and the other is a markdown package. If you are unfamiliar with markdown, it is a set of standard markup language used to write contents in a way that can later be processed to format the content it surrounds. You can read more about Markdown on Wikipedia.

Once they are installed, we can create a new directory using command line to store our project files. In this case, we are creating a directory called Pelican_Demo and then moving to it.

mkdir Pelican_Demo
cd Pelican_Demo

Once inside the newly created directory, we start creating our Pelican website. To do so, we call a Python executable script called pelican-quickstart that was installed to us in our /usr/local/bin directory. So we can run this script simply by calling it as follows:

pelican-quickstart

This would kick start our Pelican static website generator which then proceeds with a series of questions that you need to answer to finally create your static website.

What these set of questions actually does to your Python based Pelican static website will be a topic for another post. But for now, you should be good to go using your website.

If you want to just get your hands dirty and try to get Pelican up and running without wanting to dig deeper into investigating how it works, then you can use the following script to get going.

https://github.com/digitallyamar/Python3-Pelican-Installer

This script will install all the required packages and answer all the questions of pelican-quickstart automatically for you so that you can simply run it and jump to view the newly created Pelican static website. Follow the instructions given in that Python3-Pelican-Installer github project to get it up and running in no time to get a taste of what Pelican static website looks and feels like.

Good luck!

Categories
STATIC WEBSITES TUTORIALS

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Static Vs Dynamic Websites

Static websites are gaining popularity these days. A static website can be built using static website generators such as Jekyll (Ruby), Next (Javascript), Hugo (GO), Pelican (Python) etc. But very few people understand the benefits and disadvantages of using a static website. This article will try to explain this in a way that should hopefully make it easy for someone looking to decide between static website vs dynamic website for their purposes.

What is a static website?

Most of the websites we use these days are often dynamic websites. These dynamic websites have databases through which the content of a webpage is generated on the server dynamically and then sent to the user’s browser. Advantage of this is that each of the users get customized contents specific to them that are different from what would be delivered to other users. An example of this can be Facebook homepage of a user who get to see the posts from his friends and network. Google search result page is another example of a dynamic page that varies from person to person for the same query based on his browsing history.

Contrary to this, a static website is usually made up of static content (mostly using only HTML & CSS) that are already stored as complete files on the server. Thus, each of the users who request a particular webpage from this server will always receive the same content. Usually, these webpages are pre-built and stored on a file server and this file as a whole is then just sent back to the user’s browser when requested.

Advantages Of A Static Website

  • Fast: As these websites serve prebuilt HTML webpages, they are extremely fast.
  • Secure: As these websites do not possess a database but just a set of files served from a simple web based file server, there are no security threats seen that comes with using a database.
  • Cheap: The cost of hosting a static website is in pennies compared to a dynamic website as it just needs a simple web enabled file server.

Disadvantages Of A Static Website

  • As the contents are static and created in advance, no dynamic contents can be added to the web page.
  • User interactivity is limited due to the static nature of the website.
  • Usually static websites lack components such as comments, user login, recommendation engine, real time notifications etc. However, these can still be added through some 3rd party external services.
  • Programming knowledge is required to work with static websites. As we need to use static website generator tools that are quite technical in nature, users who wish to use static websites should be technically capable.
  • Content Management Systems (CMS) are usually missing in static websites. However there does exist some 3rd party CMS services such as Contentful that can overcome this issue.
  • Each time a new article is to be added, the static website generator builds the entire website and redeploy to the web server. This can be time consuming and can also be prone to unforeseen technical errors.
  • Not suitable for a large website with thousands of articles as updating such static website can be extremely slow.

Conclusion

Each of these static vs dynamic websites brings about their own set of advantages and challenges. So a decision as to which one is better for you completely boils down to how familiar you are with programming to work with static website generators, your website content types and its requirements.

If you are just looking for simple blog type of website to operate at a cheap cost, you can definitely opt for a static website. On the other hand, if you are looking to create a website having thousands of web pages or contents that are to be customized specific to each user, then dynamic website is the way to go!