The future of custom-built small websites

Posted on July 20, 2006 by Richard Cyganiak

Ismael Ghalimi: How To Build a Website with Office 2.0

Can you build a company website just by mashing up Web 2.0 services? It turns out there are still some problems, but it’s getting closer. Ismael uses WordPress as the main platform, DabbleDB for structured content, Zoho Writer for press releases, Flickr for image hosting, and a bunch of other Web 2.0 goodness. All tied together by RSS and JSON and WordPress plugins and small bits of custom PHP.

I’m quite excited about this stuff. Web 2.0 apps will make custom websites much more affordable for small businesses and other organizations.

Platform plus Plugins: Ismael’s experiment also shows the most likely architecture for this new breed of website: a very flexible main platform with a plugin architecture that allows to pull in functionality and content from a wide range of Web 2.0 services. The main platform may be hosted by a commercial provider, or self-hosted if much customization is needed.

A prediction: Over the next twelve months, one software package will receive a lot of attention as the main platform for this kind of website. WordPress seems to be the most likely candidate, with Drupal and Mambo/Joomla as weaker alternatives. Almost all other small CMS projects and weblogging engines will be dead in two year’s time.

(Via Phil Jones)

This entry was posted in General. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to The future of custom-built small websites

  1. Maggi says:
    July 20, 2006 at 12:30

    A rather depressing thought, this means the whole Web 2.0 community will be stuck with PHP. Dang it. Where is the developer to stand and create a similar plugin-based CMS using Python? Ore maybe Ruby?

  2. Richard Cyganiak says:
    July 20, 2006 at 14:41

    Yes, I think that PHP has already won as the language for the “main platform”. It is deeply entrenched in the “download some script and hack around until it does what I want” area of web development, it is easy to learn, there’s a huge developer base, and with a plugin architecture network effects kick in. It’s a bit sad, but Python and Ruby will stay niche solutions in this area.

    Many of the Web 2.0 apps driving this whole process are implemented in these languages though.

  3. Pingback: Common Sense » How to build a website2.0

  4. phil jones says:
    July 21, 2006 at 01:58

    But imagine if it could be Ning for writing and hosting the PHP glue … ;-)

    Of course, personally, I’m totally with Maggi on the Python thing. Just downloaded TurboGears and seriously thinking of doing *something* with it.

Comments are closed.