Technology Notes
The technology behind the MWSA website includes one of the leading content management system (CMS) platforms. While the technology is complex, that same complexity allows us to hide some great "magic" from site visitors and MWSA members.
Some of our members are curious about the technology, but you don't have to be a "techie" to appreciate the website's power.
Core CMS Platform: Drupal
Most of the functionality of the new site is delivered by the core modules of Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/), the same CMS platform used by The Economist magazine, dozens of newspapers, university departments, and the Whitehouse media relations website. Drupal code powers thousands of commercial and non-profit websites. The platform also is the heart of large customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Drupal is an "open source" platform. The great thing about Drupal is that the code is extensible: a good programmer can add custome "modules" to Drupal. An active community of developers also shares modules with each other, trading their best ideas. If we develop a great new feature for the MWSA website, we can share that code with Drupal developers. This allows programmers to test and improve code.
As of this writing (Dec 2011), there are 28 open source and customized modules adding features to the MWSA website. There are also a dozen custom "views" of data, requiring complex SQL queries.
Customized Features
To add features to the MWSA website, a developer writes code in PHP (http://us2.php.net/). Because programmers have an odd sense of humor, PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. (PHP is a "recursive" accronym, a geek pun.) Programming in PHP is not difficult, but the MWSA website has more than 3000 small PHP scripts. There is a massive amount of computer code behind the scenes.
None of the pages on the MWSA are "static" HTML. The HTML visitors and members see is created by PHP programs in real-time. The PHP scripts generate XHTML and CSS, which is then sent to a visitor's browser. As far as users know, the pages viewed are composed in HTML when the reality is that PHP is "creating" each page. That programming magic means that if an article is edited and published, it instantly appears for future website visitors. Likewise, changes to a user profile become available to other members.