Before we go any further I want to talk about the Open Source approach to software development so that you can have a clear undertanding of just how valuable and powerful Open Source software can be. To do this, let's do a comparison between the commercial approach to software development and the Open Source approach.
First the Commercial Approach.....
Let's say I have a software company and I want to create a program to sell to the public. First I am going to have to hire a few programmers (unless I am going to program it all myself), either way this is going to take a large investment of time and money. So to protect that investment I will have to invest even more time and money into programming security measures into the program to prevent it from being cracked and put up on the internet for free download. And no matter how much time and money I spend on this step...eventually, it will be cracked (probably by some 12-14 year old kid in his bedroom) and will be put out there for people to get for free rather than purchase it from my company.
Now let's look at the disadvantages to the end user with this approach.
First of all the power and functionality of the program is going to be limited to the knowledge and experience of the few programmers who have created it.
Secondly, for the program to continue to be useful for more than a short period of time, it will have to be continually updated and reprogrammed to keep up with today's rapidly evolving technologies industries. That means that not only will the programmers who created it have to work very hard on expanding their knowledge base but it will also require an ongoing additional investment into the program which will depend on how much money the program is making in sales. And if the program has made it to the stage of being cracked and put up for free download, this will greatly decrease the sales profit from the program.
Now the Open Source approach...
Open Source programs (or projects) are typically created and maintained in a collaborative effort between several programmers. And more importantly the source code for the program is opened up to any programmer in the world that would like to contribute to the program...thus the name "Open Source".
First the Commercial Approach.....
Let's say I have a software company and I want to create a program to sell to the public. First I am going to have to hire a few programmers (unless I am going to program it all myself), either way this is going to take a large investment of time and money. So to protect that investment I will have to invest even more time and money into programming security measures into the program to prevent it from being cracked and put up on the internet for free download. And no matter how much time and money I spend on this step...eventually, it will be cracked (probably by some 12-14 year old kid in his bedroom) and will be put out there for people to get for free rather than purchase it from my company.
Now let's look at the disadvantages to the end user with this approach.
First of all the power and functionality of the program is going to be limited to the knowledge and experience of the few programmers who have created it.
Secondly, for the program to continue to be useful for more than a short period of time, it will have to be continually updated and reprogrammed to keep up with today's rapidly evolving technologies industries. That means that not only will the programmers who created it have to work very hard on expanding their knowledge base but it will also require an ongoing additional investment into the program which will depend on how much money the program is making in sales. And if the program has made it to the stage of being cracked and put up for free download, this will greatly decrease the sales profit from the program.
Now the Open Source approach...
Open Source programs (or projects) are typically created and maintained in a collaborative effort between several programmers. And more importantly the source code for the program is opened up to any programmer in the world that would like to contribute to the program...thus the name "Open Source".
This presents a huge advantage over the commercial programming approach in that the programs usefulness is not limited to the knowledge and experience of just a handful of programmers. Any programmer who recognizes a need in the program can create an extension to be plugged into the original program.
This will also allow the program to continue to evolve and grow only a long period of time with new features and functionality always being added.
Now there are free Open Source programs out there for just about anything that you want to do. What we are wanting to do is create websites. So what we need for that is a CMS (or Content Management System). There are several popular CMS programs available but for the purpose of these articles I will be talking about a program called Joomla. This is my favorite CMS program because it is easy to get up and running very quickly even if you are not a programmer and have never built a website before. While at the same time it is a very powerful program that can be used to create very complex sites.
The advantage to using a CMS program like Joomla is that all of the content data for your site is stored in a database rather than just having a site built from static HTML pages. So you will be able to completely change the layout and all of the graphics for the site with the touch of a button without having to touch the data at all. Your site will be able to dynamically rebuild the page layout and graphics around the content data in your database.
You can learn more about Joomla at the official Joomla site http://www.joomla.org/. I will be talking about different sections of their website later on in this series of articles. But don't worry about reading up on how to install the program because I will be showing you how this will be done automatically for you from within your hosting account in the next article so you want be doing a manual installation.
Next Article in this series: PART III - Getting Started
Previous Article in this series: PART I - Using Free Open Source software
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