The Simple Definition:

JavaScript is a form of scripting that enables dynamic features to be embedded into web pages to include items that are constantly updated. Examples of usage could be the embedding of an RSS Feed on a website to provide the latest news updates from another website, a dynamic gallery that rotates photos at predetermined periods of time, java script website menus,  or can be used for the display of live feeds such as cams or video feeds from a remote website.

It’s called “client side” scripting as no calls are made on the server that the website is hosted on and where the script is installed. . In web design circles JavaScript is generally found as useful for adding dynamic content to a website but suffers from a unique problem and that is although it is visible to the human eye  the same as the coding , for some reason search engines can’t see it.

If you fill up a whole page with just JavaScript to a search engine bot it is essentially an empty page. Couple this to the fact some people do switch off java in their web browser  Add to that the user has to download Java to add it to their browser and requires updates independently and Java then becomes a bit of an issue!

Finally too much JavaScript does slow down the loading of a web page which can lead to lower rankings with Google and other search engines as they do use page load speed as part of the complex algorithmfor ranking websites. JavaScript does have it’s uses and used in small amounts is a fast way to add dynamic client side content  and interest to a website but used heavily it can be detrimental to a website and its performance.

The Official Definition:

JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. It can be characterized as a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is also considered a functional programming language like Scheme and OCaml because it has closures and supports higher-order functions.

JavaScript is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. However, its use in applications outside web pages—for example in PDF-documents, site-specific browsers and desktop widgets—is also significant.

JavaScript uses syntax influenced by that of C. JavaScript copies many names and naming conventions from Java, but the two languages are otherwise unrelated and have very different semantics. The key design principles within JavaScript are taken from the Self and Scheme programming languages.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.[1] This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. While the author of a document typically links that document to a CSS style sheet, readers can use a different style sheet, perhaps one on their own computer, to override the one the author has specified.

CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Internet media type (MIME type) text/css is registered for use with CSS by RFC 2318 (March 1998).

The popularity of CSS as a design tool has increased steadily and is now regarded as the premier system for website design

The Simple Definition:

In simple terms MY SQL is the storage of website information which is catalogued into categories and indexed to be later called upon by the php script  within a CMS such as wordpress to create a dynamic web page on the fly. In a word it’s a database software for use on servers. In physical terms it equates to a library. MY SQL merely stores and processes that information via the MY SQL software on the server for the pages to be rendered by the appropriate coding. MY SQL on its own is virtually useless  as it needs to be told what to do and when and how to do it which is the job of the php code within a wordpress software program. PHP you could say is the librarian retrieving the book and presenting it to the person requesting that particular item.

The Technical Definition:

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. MySQL is officially pronounced /maɪˌɛskjuːˈɛl/ (“My S-Q-L”),[2] but is often also pronounced /maɪˈsiːkwəl/ (“My Sequel”). It is named after developer Michael Widenius’ daughter, My. The SQL phrase stands for Structured Query Language.

The MySQL development project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL was owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Oracle Corporation.

Free-software projects that require a full-featured database management system often use MySQL. Where the project may lead to something in commercial use, the license terms need careful study. Some free software project examples: Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, Drupal and other software built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products, including Wikipedia, Google[5] (though not for searches) and Facebook.

 
UsesMySQL is a popular choice of database for use in web applications, and is a central component of the widely used LAMP web application software stack—LAMP is an acronym for “Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP”. Its popularity is closely tied to the popularity of PHP.

MySQL is used in some of the most frequently visited web sites on the Internet, including Flickr,Nokia.com, YouTubeand as previously mentioned; Wikipedia, Google and Facebook.

[edit] Platforms and interfacesMySQL is written in C and C++. Its SQL parser is written in yacc, and a home-brewed lexical analyzer named sql_lex.cc.

MySQL works on many different system platforms, including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, eComStation, i5/OS, IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, OS/2 Warp, QNX, Solaris, Symbian, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Sanos and Tru64. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS also exists.

Many programming languages with language-specific APIs include libraries for accessing MySQL databases. These include MySQL Connector/Net for integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studio (languages such as C# and VB are most commonly used) and the ODBC driver for Java. In addition, an ODBC interface called MyODBC allows additional programming languages that support the ODBC interface to communicate with a MySQL database, such as ASP or ColdFusion. The HTSQL – URL based query method also ships with a MySQL adapter, allowing direct interaction between a MySQL database and any web client via structured URLs. The MySQL server and official libraries are mostly implemented in ANSI C/ANSI C++.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document.

As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as a standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.

PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 and has been in continuous development ever since. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by the PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification. PHP is free software released under the PHP License.
 History:    
Rasmus Lerdorf, who wrote the original Common Gateway Interface component, and Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who rewrote the parser that formed PHP 3 . PHP originally stood for personal home page.Its development began in 1994 when the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf initially created a set of Perl scripts he called ‘Personal Home Page Tools’ to maintain his personal homepage, including tasks such as displaying his résumé and recording how much traffic his page was receiving.

He rewrote these scripts as C programming language Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries, extending them to add the ability to work with web forms and to communicate with databases and called this implementation ‘Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter’ or PHP/FI. PHP/FI could be used to build simple, dynamic web applications. Lerdorf released PHP/FI as ‘Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0′ publicly on June 8, 1995, to accelerate bug location and improve the code. This release already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was similar to Perl but was more limited and simpler, although less consistent. A development team began to form and, after months of work and beta testing, officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997.

Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language’s name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP’s core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel.

On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. As of August 2008 this branch is up to version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is no longer under development nor will any security updates be released.

On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II.PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance enhancements.In 2008 PHP 5 became the only stable version under development. Late static binding had been missing from PHP and was added in version 5.3.

A new major version has been under development alongside PHP 5 for several years. This version was originally planned to be released as PHP 6 as a result of its significant changes, which included plans for full Unicode support. However, Unicode support took developers much longer to implement than originally thought, and the decision was made in March 2010 to move the project to a branch, with features still under development moved to trunk.

Changes in the new code include the removal of register_globals, magic quotes, and safe mode. The reason for the removals was that register_globals had given way to security holes, and the use of magic quotes had an unpredictable nature, and was best avoided. Instead, to escape characters, magic quotes may be replaced with the addslashes() function, or more appropriately an escape mechanism specific to the database vendor itself like mysql_real_escape_string() for MySQL. Functions that will be removed in future versions and have been deprecated in PHP 5.3 will produce a warning if used.

Many high-profile open-source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code as of February 5, 2008, because of the GoPHP5 initiative, provided by a consortium of PHP developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

PHP currently does not have native support for Unicode or multibyte strings; Unicode support is under development for a future version of PHP and will allow strings as well as class, method, and function names to contain non-ASCII characters.

PHP interpreters are available on both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, but on Microsoft Windows the only official distribution is a 32-bit implementation, requiring Windows 32-bit compatibility mode while using Internet Information Services (IIS) on a 64-bit Windows platform. As of PHP 5.3.0, experimental 64-bit versions are available for MS Windows.

LicensingPHP is free software released under the PHP License

HTML The Definition.

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML is the basic building-blocks of webpages. A markup language is a set of markup tags, and HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages.

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags, enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the web page content. HTML tags normally come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags).

The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visual or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.

HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML web pages.

Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicitly presentational HTML markup

Features:  WordPress has a web template system using a template processor. Users can re-arrange widgets without editing PHP or HTML code; they can also install and switch between themes. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters are also included, providing standardized formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes). WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.

Native applications exist for Android, iPhone/iPod Touch,and BlackBerry which provide access to some of the features in the WordPress Admin panel and work with WordPress.com and many WordPress.org blogs.

Deployment: WordPress can be deployed using various methods on a hosting environment. Users have the option to download the current version of WordPress from WordPress.org. From there, they can upload the source code and its dependencies to their hosting environment.

WordPress can also be installed via package management system or deploying a ready-to-use TurnKey WordPress appliance, which does not require any manual setup or configuration.

WordPress can also be installed via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer which installs WordPress on Windows and IIS. The Web PI will automatically detect any missing dependencies such as PHP or MySQL then install and configure them[10] before installing WordPress.

A lot of web hosting firms offer one-click script auto installer program such as Fantastico via C Panel in their packages. Users can simply install WordPress through such program.

Advanced users have the option to have WordPress downloaded to their server and consistently updated using SVN. This will allow users to remain updated easily.

Free hosting services such as WordPress.com offer users an easy way to deploy a WordPress blog on-line without having to install WordPress on their own web server. A subdomain account (e.g. yourname.wordpress.com) will be created upon the sign up of free hosting service. Many shared web hosting services also offer automated WordPress installation through their control panel.

 History: b2/cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to WordPress.b2/cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 blogs as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Although WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of Mullenweg.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart and many of its most influential users migrated to WordPress.By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report reached the conclusion that WordPress enjoyed the greatest brand strength of any open source content management systems.

Information courtesy Wikipedia