Glossary - OLD Komotion

AdWords

Akismet

Akismet is a plugin that is provided by WordPress and comes pre-installed in your Komotion website CMS. checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.

Apache

The Apache HTTP Server, commonly known as just Apache, is open-source web server software that plays a key role in the growth of the World Wide Web. Apache is the most popular HTTP server software in use, serving over 50% of all websites in the world. The majority of web servers using Apache run a Unix -like operating system, such as Linux.

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries, called blog posts, are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites, with static pages.

Blogs are usually created and managed using blog software. As specialized content management systems, weblog applications support the authoring, editing, and publishing of blog posts and comments, with special functions for image management, moderation of posts and comments, and web syndication (where website material is made available to other sites through a “web feed”).

Blog Post

See Post.

Cache

Cache is a component of your website that transparently and automatically stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. Assembling pages dynamically for each request has the advantage that new information can be included. For example, if a blog page is requested, the newly assembled page can show a reader comment posted just moments before. On the other hand, dynamically generating pages can put stress on the server and take longer to process and serve the page to the viewer’s browser. A caching system allows for a page, once generated, to be stored in the cache and served again directly without having to be reprocessed. There are rules in place that control under what conditions a new page will be generated again for the cache to ensure the viewer will not see content that is obsolete. See also Cached Page.

Cached Page

A Cached Page is a Page that has been generated by the server and then stored in the cache for quick future access. Your website generally consists of Dynamic Pages, assembled on-the-fly with data from your Database. To minimize delays, once a page is generated, it is stored in the cache, ready to be used again. See also Cache.

Child Page

The concept of a parent/children is related to nested lists or hierarchies. If you visualize a nested list, such as the Windows Explorer view showing folders and files, or a nested bullet list in Microsoft Word, or a genealogy tree chart, they all have “nodes” or “elements”. A node that contains another one is a Parent. A node that is contained by another node is a Child. Note that a node can be a child and a parent at the same time. It is also important to note that Web Pages in this context are closer to a genealogy tree than to a Windows Explorer view. In a genealogy tree, all nodes are people; similarly in your website all nodes are web pages. In windows Explorer, the nodes are of two kinds: folders and files; a folder (parent) is different than a file (child) as only folders can be containers – a file cannot contain other files .

For the purposes of the Komotion documentation and your website, there are no “folders” in your page hierarchy, meaning there are no “container objects”. A child node, in our case a Child Page, is still a page itself. See also Parent Page.

CMS

CMS stands for Content Management System – a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment, designed to:

Allow a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
Control access to data, based on user roles (which define what information each can view or edit)
Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
Reduce duplication of input
Improve the ease of report writing
Improve communication between users

A web content management system is designed to simplify the publication of web content to websites – in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.

Komotion websites use WordPress as the back-end CMS .

Database

A database is a collection of data stored on the server. For example, when you create a new web page for your website, you create the Page Title and the Page Content and maybe set some other properties for the page, like turning comments off. All these are stored in the database, as properties of a page, identified by the Page ID. When a web browser requests a page from the server, the server then assembles the page dynamically, using the page data that is stored in the database.

Komotion websites use MySQL databases. MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database and it is an integral part of a LAMP development environment. Learn more about MySQL on Wikipedia.

Dynamic Page

Dynamic Pages are web pages that are assembled on-the-fly, when a browser requests them from the server. These pages are generally not pure HTML (as Static Pages are); rather they also contain server instruction code, typically PHP. The server though does not serve PHP pages, as these basically contain server instructions. When the PHP page is called, the instructions are processed by the server and a HTML page is assembled dynamically, on-the-fly, and served to the browser. Instructions in the PHP page may pull content from other pages or from the database, processed and inserted into the page before it is sent to the browser.

Note that generally your Komotion website pages have addresses that do not show an extension, rather they end in a backslash – “/”. This is because the link points to a directory, the ending backslash specifically identifies the previous text as being a directory (not file) name. The browser goes to that folder and requests the default file from there, like index.php.

Learn more about Dynamic Pages on Wikipedia.

Excerpt

Excerpts are condensed summaries of your blog posts, with blogging tools being able to handle these in various ways. In WordPress, Excerpts can be specifically written to summarize the post, or generated automatically by using the first few paragraphs of a post or using the post up to a specific point, assigned by you.

Feeds

A Feed is a function of special software that allows “Feedreaders” to access a site automatically looking for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined as “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”), Atom or RDF files.

Learn more about feeds from Mezzoblue & Dave Shea.

FLOSS

Please see free software.

FOSS

Please see free software.

Free software

Free software is about the usage rights – users are free to use, study, modify, redistribute (in modified or unmodified form) with minimal restrictions (only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things). Free software is not about price but about usage right. Free software can be available without charge but can also have a fee related to the form of distribution of additional value adds like instruction and support. Alternative terms are FOSS (free and open source software) and FLOSS (free, libre and open source software).

Free software, which may or may not be distributed free of charge, is distinct from freeware which, by definition, does not require payment for use. The authors or copyright holders of freeware may retain all rights to the software; it is not necessarily permissible to reverse engineer, modify, or redistribute freeware.

Free software is also slightly different than open-source software. Free software puts more emphasis on the freedom to modify and redistribute code. Learn more about the philosophical difference between free and open-source software at GNU.org.

Google AdWords

An advertising service which places relevant advertisements on search results pages and other content. When a user searches for keywords using Google, AdWords advertisements related to those keywords are displayed on the right, top and/or bottom of the search results pages alongside the organic search results.

LAMP

LAMP is a development platform, a solution stack of technologies to build general purpose application servers. The name is an acronym for Linux (operating system) + Apache (HTTP server) + MySQL (database software) + PHP (sometimes also Perl and Python). The software combination is popular because it is open-source and therefore easily adaptable to specific needs. Learn more about LAMP on Wikipedia.

Linkback

A linkback is a method for website authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their pages. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to, their articles. The three methods – Refback, Trackback, and Pingback – differ in how they accomplish this task. Your Komotion WebPack site uses Trackback and Pingback. Learn more about linkback on Wikipedia.

Linux

Linux is an operating system kernel that is a variation of Unix. Linux is a great choice for web-server applications because its emphasis on security. Like the other LAMP components, Linux is open-source software which means the source code is provided with operating system, which can be freely edited according to specific needs.

MySQL

MySQL is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to the content in the databases. MySQL is open-source software. Popular open-source software that uses MySQL are WordPress (blog and website CMS), phpBB (bulletin board forum software), Drupal (CMS), and more built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale products including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook, Flickr.

Open-source

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that makes available its source code. Open source software is often developed in public, collaborative manner and allows not only access to “see” the source code but to modify it. Derivative works of open-source software can generally be re-distributed, as long as those rights are passed on.

Open-source software is similar to, albeit philosophically different than free software. Open-source is the opposite of closed source, or proprietary software. Open source software is also different from source-available, or shared source software, which simply means that the source code is available to be viewed but may not be modified or redistributed.

To learn more about this concept in general, see open source on Wikipedia.

Page

Pages, or web pages, are the basic building block of any website. Some of the most important properties of a page are: Page Title and Page Permalink. Posts are a particular type of web page.

Page Content

One of the most important properties of a page, it contains the text, links and other content that is displayed on the page. When you enter your content in a page, using the Admin back-end, that content is actually entered in the Database. When a viewer requests to see that page in the browser, the dynamic page is built on-the-fly (or pulled from the cache) and served to the viewer’s web browser.

Page ID

The Page ID is the most important attribute of a Page. It is a unique identifier for that page in the database. This is why you can change the Page Title or Page Permalink for a page and your website will still know where to get the content for that specific page from the Database.

The Page ID is not prominently displayed; if you need to find it for a page you are editing, take a look at the address shown in your browser window. It will show something like this:

/wp-admin/post.php?post=[highlight1]7940[/highlight1]&action=edit&message=1

A Post ID is the same thing, but for Posts.

Page Permalink

See Permalink.

The sidebar is a narrow vertical column often jam-packed with lots of information about a website and usually appears on the right or left-hand side of the web page. You can populate a sidebar with widgets.

Page Slug

See Post Slug.

Pingback

Pingback is one of three types of Linkbacks. Pingbacks allow you to notify a weblog of your entry just by posting its permalink directly in the content of your blog entry. No special trackback link necessary.

To enable pinging URLs in the blog entry, make sure there is a check mark next to “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)” in the “Options->Discussion” section of the your Admin screen.

Additional resources:

Page Title

Parent Page

The concept of a parent/children is related to nested lists or hierarchies. A Parent Page, as it relates to the page hierarchy of your site, is a page which “contains” other (children) pages. For more, please see Child Page.

Permalink

A permalink, or permanent link, is a web address (URL) that points to a specific dynamic page, blog post or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. It is the web address where that page can always be accessed from.

Originally, all hyperlinks were permalinks, as content was static. However, when many web pages became dynamic, this was often not the case. Komotion websites use the permalink solution provided by WordPress. Whenever you create a new Page or Post in your website, a permalink is automatically created for it.

The default permalink structure for a page is:

http://yourdomainname.com/grandparent-page-title/parent-page-title/page-title/

The system creates the permanent link using the permalink path to the Parent Page, and appending the page (or post) slug (the title of the new page). Note that the page title is not used directly, since some characters cannot be used in URLs and other characters (such as spaces) are not recommended. The system replaces such characters with the “-” (dash) character. Users can change the permalink of any page or post by modifying the last part of the string; the “parent-page-title” from the example above.

Once the permalink for a page is created, you can change the Page Title and the permalink will not change.

The role of permalinks is to help set permanent addresses to a page, so links to those pages are reliable. Once you create a page and you or someone else has created links to it, it is best to not change its permalink; doing so will break those links.

There are two ways a permalink can change:

You can expressly change it from the top of the Page Edit or Post Edit screen.
The system changes it if and when you move the page in your website hierarchy. If the page, or a parent of the page, have a new parent, the permalink will change to reflect that.

The default permalink structure for a post is:

http://yourdomainname.com/year-month-date/post-title/

Otherwise the behavior is similar to pages; key points are:

Once you create a post, a permalink is automatically created for it
Once a permalink is created, you can choose to change it by changing the part the system automatically created from the post title
If you change the Past Date, the permalink will automatically update to reflect that
It is good practice, once you create a post and you or someone else may start to link to it, to keep permalink as is so not to create broken links

PHP

PHP is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. The name stands for Hypretext Preprocessor, though originally it stood for Personal Home Page . There are other scripting languages used for dynamic pages, like ASP (Active Server Pages) for Windows servers. PHP is the most popular scripting language for Linux servers and the one used for Komotion websites.

Learn more about PHP on Wikipedia.

Plugin

Plugins are tools to extend the functionality of your website. The core of the Content Management System (CMS) used by Komotion is designed to be lean, to maximize flexibility and minimize code bloat. Plugins offer custom functions and features so users can tailor their site to their specific needs.

Post

Posts (or blog posts) are a specific type of Pages (or web pages). Posts are entries in a blog and are dynamic pages that are typically displayed reverse-chronologically in the blog. Posts and Pages are the most important building blocks of a website.

All blog software supports authoring, editing and publishing of posts (or “entries”) in the following format:

Title – the main title or headline of the post
Body – main content of the post
Permalink (or URL) – the web address of the full, individual post entry
Post Date – date and time the post was published

Blog entries can optionally include the following:

Comments – allows readers to discuss the blog entry, correct errors or otherwise express opinionson the post or post’s subject
Categories (or tags) – indexes the subject discussed by the entry
Trackback and/or pingback – links to other sites that refer to the entry.

Post Category

See Category.

Post ID

Post ID.

Post Slug

If you’re using Pretty Permalinks, the Post Slug is the title of your article post within the link. The blogging tool software may simplify or truncate your title into a more appropriate form for using as a link. A title such as “I’ll Make A Wish” might be truncated to “ill-make-a-wish”. In WordPress, you can change the Post Slug to something else, like “make-a-wish”, which sounds better than a wish made when sick.

Post Tag

See Tag.

Refback

Refback is one of three types of Linkbacks.

Sidebar

See Page Sidebar.

Static Page

Generally, static pages are “old school” style HTML pages. The HTML pages sit on the server as such and when a browser requests to view the page, that HTML is served directly. See also Dynamic Page.

Slug

See Post Slug.

A community-type web service that promotes and supports forging connections among fellow users.

Tag

Tags provide a useful way to group related posts together, and to quickly tell readers what a post is about. Tags also make it easier for people to find your content. Tags are similar to, but more specific than, categories. The use of tags is completely optional.

Depending on the theme and widgets you have activated, tags can be displayed at the top or bottom of posts, on the individual post view, and/or in the sidebar. You can assign multiple tags per post.

Learn more about tags in the WordPress help pages.

Trackback

Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks. When used properly, trackbacks and pingbacks are an excellent way to build links and traffic to your blog, as well as building relationships with other bloggers.

Put simply, trackback is a way to notify a website when you publish an entry that references it. When you send it a trackback, a link with a short excerpt of your entry will appear on the referenced website.

If you are linking to another website or blog based on WordPress, an explicit trackback is not needed as long as you have the link in your content. Current WordPress platform will ping and create a pingback to that website automatically. Ping back or linkback would be virtually synonymous on current WordPress blogs.

On some other platforms the linkback will not automatically notify the other blog by pinging. On those you will need to add a trackback.

If you are linking to some of the older legacy platforms you will need to create a trackback. Trackbacks will automatically ping when you post your entry. First you will need to get the trackback url which will be different than the regular url in most cases. Just click where you see the hyperlink for the trackback url. Once you have the appropriate url you can add it to your post information by copying and pasting it into the trackback area when writing your post.

Komotin WebPack websites, based on WordPress, take Trackbacks a step further, by using Pingbacks for automatic notification.

Learn more about Trackbacks in the WordPress documentation.

Web Page

See Page.

Widget is a fancy word for tools or content that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebars of your blog. A widget is like a plugin, but designed to provide a simple way to customize the content of your website sidebar. You can access the widgets page from the Appearance menu in your Dashboard.

WordPress

WordPress is Content Management System (CMS) that is open-source and used as a blog and website publishing application, powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. Used by over 12% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites, WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today.

WordPress initially started as blog software (also called weblog software or blogware) and designed to simplify the creation and maintenence of weblogs, or blogs. WordPress has evolved beyond its blogging software roots and can now be used as a general CMS, capable of managing almost any type of website.