On the shoulders of giants

For those who like to put things into perspective a few words on where the Drikatruu template to Wordpress as CMS sits in the bigger scheme of things. Let’s look at the server who dished you this page. It is a computer which runs Linux as operating system, Apache as web server application, MySQL as data management system and PHP as programming language. All of them are best in class applications. All of them are open-source programs and all of them are great at working together as a team. WordPress sits on top of all of them and is promoted as “a semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability”. That’s an awkward description of an awesome program. If all this sounds complicated, relax. Many internet hosting companies offer a one-click install of it all. Drikatruu Jelly is a template for WordPress and can only be used together with WordPress. Did I mention that WordPress is also free? Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if I tried to charge people for the template?

This would be the perfect place for a little chart to show … the big picture. Maybe later. Or why don’t you make me one?

A solid foundation for the future

WordPress and Drikatruu Jelly separate content and formatting. When you start with your site, you can focus on the content, and later, when your site has earned itself a face-lift, you ask a designer to do his magic. He or she then only needs to change the one file (called a cascading style sheet or CSS), which contains all the formatting information. If you would like to see some CSS power examples you might want to pay a short visit to the Zen Garden.

WordPress has built in support for multiple users. You can assign user-id’s and passwords to your friends and as long as they have internet access they can, without installing any software, work on your site as authors, editors or administrators. I work alone but love the fact that I can log in from anywhere and change the content of my site without having to install and configure web authoring tools.

So, as you start small, it is good to know that the technological foundation you will be using supports also sites with millions of page views per day and is a favorite of legions of developers and designers.