Chapter 1. An Introduction to e107

When I coded my first website using Notepad in 1995, little did I know that my curiosity would tax the limits of my imagination and lock me into a loop of continual education. Each year brought improvements in the presentation of web pages, and eventually we were able to present tabular data from databases.

Of course, large businesses with IT staffs were able to provide the first interactive sites and eventually these programmers would offer those services to the small business sector, but at a price commensurate with their corporate hourly rates. If the programming was not enough to prohibit small business from taking advantage of interactive websites then the high costs of web-hosting services, especially ones with databases made it economically unfeasible.

As time progressed and e-commerce continued to grow in popularity the demand was on for a low-cost alternative for small businesses to take advantage of interactive websites. The dot-com bust brought a surplus of bandwidth and server space to the market effectively reducing hosting costs. Microsoft continued to gain in popularity with the FrontPage web-design program, making it easy for non-programmers to make attractive sites, and collect data via a form and easily send it to the Access database program. Well, maybe it was not so easy for the newbie but it was possible.

Most entrepreneurs or small business owners did not have the financial resources to operate a CMS. In 1995, Rasmus Lerdorft created a set of scripts written in PERL called PHP/FI. This early work inspired Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski to create a scripting language and, working together with Rasmus Lerdorft, they officially launched PHP 3.0 as the successor to PHP/FI. If you would like to learn more you can read all about it at http://us2.php.net/history.

Why is this important? Because it is easy to learn and implement, PHP has grown into the primary script for creating interactive websites and is the primary script for content management systems. Today CMS are growing in popularity—blogs, dating sites, bulletin boards, and yes even book publishers use content management systems.

There are hundreds if not thousands of open-source content management systems available; however, e107 has rapidly emerged in the forefront for its ease of use and its modular build. If you are not a computer geek a modular build allows you to activate only the elements necessary thus saving resources.