hcg


PHPXref - Use the Source

Gone are the days of Microsoft Frontpage.

PHP Pinup

At the dawn of the Internet, we had to hand code HTML pages by hand, Notepad was our friend. For personal use it was alright, but having to maintain clients this way was mucho cumbersome. Should anything change in their world, like a product price, we had to do the answer phone call, edit said HTML file, then ftp it up to the server dance.

Then came Frontpage, the answer to all our dreams, we thought. Code said website, upload it to the server, then hand it over to the client and they’ll handle the updating from that point on for the small details. We soon came to realize that Frontpage gobbled up our beautifully crafted code and spit out Redmond’s own brand of what the web should look like, ActiveX, VBScript, et al.

On June 8, 1995 came the message to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi newsgroup from Rasmus Lerdorf. Personal Home Page Tools, or PHP for short, was born. Fast forward to July of 2010 and PHP is the most widely used Apache module on the over 100 million servers that the Apache web server is running on. Microsoft is in second place with 53 million servers.

PHP served these words to you, I filled out a form on the backend of Textpattern CMS, the content management system that controls this site. Now we can design sites and hand them over to clients for their updates, our design code left untouched, nicely adorning the content.

Textpattern, like PHP and Apache are Open Source applications. They are free to download and utilize as we see fit. We’ve gained control of the most important medium since the printing press, and I’m so appreciative. As a tip of my hat to the many developers who give of their free time, I maintain PHPXref, a cross referenced code library of PHP applications.

You have held us down for so long
Everything you said, it was wrong
You can’t even look us in the eyes
While your headlines scream out pompous lies