University of Gondar

Faculty of Informatics
Department of Information Technology for PG Program
Year-2nd
Assignment for Web Application Development (IT 616)

Set by:
Tesfaye Ashebr Sec. 3
Id GUS/22461/10

Submitted to: Instructor Yosef Berhanu (Phdc)

August 2011 E.C

Gondar, Ethiopia
 Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ............................................................................................................... i
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
1.1. Server-side Scripting ........................................................................................................ 1
1.1.1. Server-side scripting languages: ............................................................................... 1
1.2. Client-side Scripting......................................................................................................... 2
1.2.1. Client-side scripting languages: ................................................................................ 2
1.3. Difference between Server-side Scripting and Client-side Scripting............................... 3
1.4. Conclusion........................................................................................................................ 5
2. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 6
2.1. How to design a good website? ........................................................................................ 6
3. Content management system (CMS) ....................................................................................... 9
3.1.1. Word Press .................................................................................................................. 10
3.1.2. Joomla......................................................................................................................... 11
3.1.3. Drupal ......................................................................................................................... 12
3.2. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 15
References ..................................................................................................................................... 16
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First of all we would like to thank our GOD that helped us in all up and down and who made us
to successfully complete this assignment effectively beyond what we had anticipated. Next we
would like to express our deepest gratitude to our Instructor Yosef Berhanu and who contributed
all their idea in order to make this assignment the best as much as we need.

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Introduction

1.1.Server-side Scripting

Server-side scripting is a technique of programming for producing the code which can run
software on the server side, in simple words any scripting or programming that can run on the
web server is known as server-side scripting. The operations like customization of a website,
dynamic change in the website content, response generation to the user’s queries, accessing the
database, and so on are performed at the server end.

The server-side scripting constructs a communication link between a server and a client (user).
Earlier the server side scripting is implemented by the CGI (Common Gateway
Interface) scripts. The CGI was devised to execute the scripts from programming languages
such as C++ or Perl on the websites.

The server-side involves three parts: server, database, API’s and back-end web software
developed by the server-side scripting language. When a browser sends a request to the server
for a webpage consisting of server-side scripting, the web server processes the script prior to
serving the page to the browser. Here the processing of a script could include extracting
information from a database, making simple calculations, or choosing the appropriate content
that is to be displayed in the client end. The script is being processed and the output is sent to the
browser. The web server abstracts the scripts from the end user until serving the content, which
makes the data and source code more secure.

1.1.1. Server-side scripting languages:

After the advent of CGI, multiple programming languages were evolved such as PHP, Python,
Ruby, ColdFusion, C#, Java, C++ and so on for server-side scripting among which some of them
are described below:

PHP: It is the most prevalent server-side language used on the web which was designed to
extract and manipulate information in the database. The language is used in association with
SQL language for the Database. It is used in Facebook, Word-Press and Wikipedia.

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Python: The language is fast and contains shorter code. It is good for beginners as it
concentrates on the readability and simplicity of the code. Python functions well in the object-
oriented environment and used in famous sites like Youtube, Google, etc.

Ruby: It contains complex logic which packages the back-end with database utility which can
also be provided by PHP and SQL.

1.2. Client-side Scripting

Client-side scripting is performed to generate a code that can run on the client end (browser)
without needing the server side processing. Basically, these types of scripts are placed inside an
HTML document. The client-side scripting can be used to examine the user’s form for the errors
before submitting it and for changing the content according to the user input. As I mentioned
before, the web requires three elements for its functioning which are, client, database and server.

The effective client-side scripting can significantly reduce the server load. It is designed to run
as a scripting language utilizing a web browser as a host program. For example, when a user
makes a request via browser for a webpage to the server, it just sent the HTML and CSS as plain
text, and the browser interprets and renders the web content in the client end.

1.2.1. Client-side scripting languages:

HTML: It is the fundamental building blocks of web programming which provides the frame to
the website. It describes the arrangement of the content.

CSS: CSS provides the way to design the graphic elements which help in making the appearance
of the web application more attractive.

JavaScript: It is also a client-side scripting language which essentially devised for the specific
purpose, but currently there are various JavaScript frameworks used as server-side scripting
technology.

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1.3. Difference between Server-side Scripting and Client-side Scripting

The scripts can be written in two forms, at the server end (back end) or at the client end (server
end). The main difference between server-side scripting and client-side scripting is that the
server side scripting involves server for its processing. On the other hand, client-side scripting
requires browsers to run the scripts on the client machine but does not interact with the server
while processing the client-side scripts.

A script is generally a series of program or instruction, which has to be executed on other

program or application. As we know that the web works in a client-server environment. The
client-side script executes the code to the client side which is visible to the users while a server-
side script is executed in the server end which users cannot see.

Comparison Chart

Basis for Server-side scripting Client-side scripting

comparison

Basic Works in the back end which could not Works at the front end and script
be visible at the client end. are visible among the users.

Processing Requires server interaction. Does not need interaction with

the server.

Languages PHP, ASP.net, Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

involved ColdFusion, Python, etcetera.

Affect Could effectively customize the web Can reduce the load to the server.
pages and provide dynamic websites.

Security Relatively secure. Insecure

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Generally, the main difference between server side scripting and client side scripting are:

1. Server-side scripting is used at the backend, where the source code is not viewable or
hidden at the client side (browser). On the other hand, client-side scripting is used at the
front end which users can see from the browser.

2. When a server-side script is processed it communicates to the server. As against, client-

side scripting does not need any server interaction.

3. The client-side scripting language involves languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
In contrast, programming languages such as PHP, ASP.net, Ruby, ColdFusion, Python,
C#, Java, C++, etc.

4. Server-side scripting is useful in customizing the web pages and implements the dynamic
changes in the websites. Conversely, the client-side script can effectively minimize the
load to the server.

5. Server-side scripting is more secure than client-side scripting as the server side scripts are
usually hidden from the client end, while a client-side script is visible to the users.

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1.4. Conclusion

Client-side scripting and server-side scripting works in a coordinated manner with each other.
However, both the scripting techniques are very different, where the client-side scripting
emphasize on making the interface of the web application or website more appealing and
functional. Conversely, server-side scripting emphasizes on the data accessing methods, error
handling and fast processing etcetera.

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2. Introduction

The success of any website entirely depends on how its web design is. Whether the designers
have taken the utmost care or not while developing it. Your nicely-designed site which includes
usability and utility determines the success and not the visual design. Since your site is the face
of your business and most potential customers will visit your site before they ever look in on
your store, it becomes inevitable to get your website designed cautiously. Lacking in any aspect
could end up demolishing your brand impression.

Web page design is more critical for conversions than you think. Despite using a great
conversion boosting tactic, you may not do much if it looks poor in quality. In fact, website
design doesn’t necessarily mean how it looks like and feels like, but is how it works. Even a
simple looking website with exceptional usability and well-structured, typically performs
amazingly on Google. User views of such websites are also higher than those with poor user
experience. The performance entirely depends on the effectiveness of the website.

2.1. How to design a good website?

Good website design needs a wide range of professionals having expertise in different areas.
Their collective efforts need to put in when there is a critical decision to take place. Here in this
article, we’ll outline the 8 essential principles of good website design which must be pondered
while developing a website. These design principles will definitely help web designers to
develop awe-inspiring designs and to enhance the usability of a website.
Here is the list of 8-good design principles which will make your website aesthetic, user-friendly,
effective, and engaging:

1. Simple is the best

Over-designed website may not work. Putting too many elements on the page may lead to
distract visitors from the main purpose of your website. Simplicity always works in an effective
web page design. Clean and fresh design of your website not only makes the website appealing,
but also help user to navigate from one page to another seamlessly. Loading a website having
design features which do not serve the purpose may be frustrating. Keep your design as simple as
possible so that the visitors can feel it easy-to-use and can find their ways easily.

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2. Consistency

Consistency in website design matter a lot. Give your attention to match design elements
throughout each of the pages. It can be understood that your fonts, sizes, headings, sub-headings,
and button styles must be the same throughout the website. Plan everything in advance. Finalize
the fonts and the right colors for your texts, buttons etc, and stick to them throughout the
development. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) would come in handy to keep the complete
information about design styles and elements.
3. Typography & Readability

No matter how good your design is text still rules the website as it provides users the desired
information. Since search engine crawlers are very much familiar with this data, it becomes an
integral part of SEO activities. You should keep your typography visually appealing and readable
for visitors, along with tricky use of keywords, meta-data, and other SEO-sensitive elements.
Consider using fonts that are easier to read. The modern sans-serif fonts as Arial, Helvetica etc.
can be used for the body texts. Make proper combinations of typefaces for each and every design
elements such as headlines, body texts, buttons etc.

4. Mobile compatibility

Keeping in mind the ever-growing usage of smartphones, tablets and pallets, web design must be
effective for various screens. If your website design doesn’t support all screen sizes, chance is
that you’ll lose the battle to your competitors. There are a number of web design studios or
service points from where you can turn your desktop design into a responsive and adaptive one
for all screen sizes.

5. Color palette and imagery

A perfect color combination attracts users while a poor combination can lead to distraction. This
necessitates you to pick a perfect color palette for your website which can create a pleasing
atmosphere, thus leaving a good impact on visitors. Enhance users experience by selecting
complementary color palette to give a balanced-look to your website design. Remember to white
space use as it avoids your website from visual clutter and mess. Also avoid using too many

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colors. 3 or 4 tones for the whole websites are ample to give appealing and clear design.
Same is the case with images. Don’t use multiple vibrant images

6. Easy loading

No one likes the website that takes too much time to load. So take care of it by optimizing image
sizes, combing code into a central CSS or JavaScript file as it reduces HTTP requests. Also,
compress HTML, JavaScript and CSS for enhanced loading speed.

7. Easy Navigation

Study shows that visitors stay more time on the websites having easy navigation. For effective
navigation, you may consider creating a logical page hierarchy, using bread scrums, and
designing clickable buttons. You should follow the “three-click-rule” so that visitors can get the
required information within three clicks.

8. Communication

The ultimate purpose of the visitors is to get information, and if your website is able to
communicate your visitors efficiently, most probably they would spend more time on your
website. Tricks that may work to establish effortless communication with the visitors are –
organizing information by making good use of headlines and sub-headlines, cutting the waffle,
and using bullet points, rather than long gusty sentences.

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3. Content management system (CMS)

CMS- Content Management System is a computer application. CMSs are mostly used to develop
web application containing blogs, news, events and shopping. Many Govt. Organization,
Corporate, Shopping and Marketing website use CMS. CMS is normally used to avoid writing
the code. CMS provide the default structure of the website in which one has to create page,
articles, news etc. and put the content in that and CMS automatically display the contents on the
website. A content management system (CMS) is a stand-alone application to create, manage
and the store content. As we know that a webpage’s have text, graphics, photos, video, audio etc.
that display content or interacts with the user. CMS provides all above inbuilt features and many
more.

CMS stands for content management system which is a computer application that allows
publishing, editing, modifying, organizing, deleting and maintain content from a central
interface. It also used to complex websites easily, gives maintenance and security of websites.

A Content management system (CMS) is a software system that provides website authoring,
collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users to create and manage website
content with relative ease. It is used to create and manage digital content.

Content management systems (CMS) are the platforms that most of the websites on the internet
are built on. They provide an administrative backend for website owners to add, edit, and
manage all of the content that a user sees when they visit that website.

A Content Management System, commonly known as CMS is a computer application that

supports the creation, modification and publication of digital content using a common user
interface and integrated multi-user collaborative environment.

A content management system (CMS) is a software application or set of related programs that
are used to create and manage digital content. CMSs are typically used for enterprise content
management (ECM) and web content management (WCM). A Content management system
(CMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration
tools designed to allow users to create and manage website content with relative ease. It is used

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to create and manage digital content. CMS comparison is difficult however today we are going to
compares three of the most widely used one’s CMS.

The most well-known content management systems are the following

1. Word Press

2. Joomla

3. Drupal

All three CMS Comparison platforms are open-source software, each developed and maintained
by a community of thousands, and all are free to download and use.

3.1.1. Word Press

Word Press is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. When it comes to
CMS comparison, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content
management system (or CMS) in existence today. It can also be successfully used for designing
simple websites. Word Press is powerful enough for web developers or designers to efficiently
build sites for clients; Word Press is ideal for fairly simple websites, such as everyday blogging
and news sites; and for anyone looking for an easy-to-manage site. The development on Word
Press is easy and one can see real-time changes as they apply changes on their website.

Used for simple websites, such as everyday blogging and news sites and also anyone looking for
an easy to manage site. Add-ons make it easy to expand the functionality of the site.

Benefits of Word Press

It comes with preinstalled plugin and template function.

It’s ease-of-use.
User-friendly and best for beginners and amateurs.
It has over 45,000 Plugins for almost all the functionality.
Word Press offers lots of customization options of a theme.

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3.1.2. Joomla

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content.
It’s great for e-commerce or social networking websites, but when it’s about CMS comparison it
requires a basic understanding of technical skills. Joomla is designed to perform as a community
platform, with strong social networking features. When it comes to complexity as per CMS
comparison, Joomla comes somewhere between simple WordPress and comprehensive and
advanced Drupal. Joomla helps you keep track of your web content. As per CMS comparison,
Joomla allows you to build a site with more content and structure flexibility than WordPress
offers.

Joomla allows you to build a site with more content and structure flexibility than WordPress
offers, but still with fairly easy, proper usage. Supports E-commerce, social network and many
more When CMS Comparison comes, Joomla has brilliantly combined the power and flexibility
which Drupal has to offer, while also retaining the intuitive, user-friendliness that WordPress
excels at, making it a perfect middle ground in a crowded marketplace.

Benefits of Joomla

Joomla is an open source so its license is available free of cost.

Joomla can be used for Multipurpose like government applications and organizational
websites.
It’s Easy to Use.
Not too technical.

There are thousands of templates and themes available for Joomla CMS development.

Joomla CMS development can be easily migrated to any server.

As per CMS comparison, Joomla requires certain Plugins for certain scripts. Its Customization is
limited. It is heavy for the simple and small website.

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3.1.3. Drupal

Drupal is the most difficult, but also the most powerful. It requires a familiar understanding of
HTML, CSS, and PHP. Drupal an exceptionally SEO Friendly CMS it comes with the Clean
code and effective modules. If CMS Comparison appears then Drupal is known for its powerful
taxonomy and ability to tag, categorize, and organize complex content.

Drupal used for complex, advanced and versatile site, for sites that require complex data
organization, for community platform site with multiple users and also for online stores.

Benefits of Drupal

Drupal doesn’t require any specialized capacity for coding (like HTML coding). it comes with
Thousands of free Modules.

Drupal has Basic and Advanced Features.

Drupal comes with Readymade Professional Themes.

It has the neat code and exceptionally potent modules that are liked by major search engines.

Comparison

All three are excellent choices in most cases. But your own unique scenario will require different
capabilities, which probably makes ONE of these three CMS options the perfect fit. CMS
Comparison is between Word Press, Joomla, and Drupal.

All these offer great features and tons of customization, ease-of-use, and strong security. As per
CMS comparison, choosing the right is indeed the difficult task because they’re all good options.

When compare three of them for a simple blog or brochure-type site, Word Press could be the
best choice (while very friendly for non-developers, it’s a flexible platform also capable of
creating very complex sites).

If you are looking for something more advanced than the highly customized site requiring
scalability and complex content organization, Drupal might be the best choice. And for

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something in between that has an easier learning curve, as per CMS Comparison Joomla is a
perfect choice.

When it comes to using, Word Press is most user-friendly as compared to Joomla and Drupal.

CMS comparison clearly shows Word Press is best used for simple blogging, corporate website,
or small business websites. Joomla is mainly used for, E-commerce and Social networking sites.

Drupal is the most technically advanced and good for technical people who like to get into the
technicality. Anyone considering Drupal should have at least a basic knowledge of HTML, PHP
and other common web programming languages.

Which one should you select?

Everyone has their own choices, however, if we have to select one we will go for Word Press.
Word Press is the best option among all of them as we did CMS Comparison and it’s clearly
visible that It’s super easy to add new content and there are tons of free Plugins and layouts to
choose from so we can easily change and tweak basically anything we want without needing to
know HTML, CSS, or any other programming languages.

There are thousands of different themes available. It also has a ton of security updates and
features. It’s the clear winner for us. Everyone will say their content management system is the
best. If you are still not sure which one to use, take a look at our CMS Comparison of WordPress
vs Joomla vs Drupal. It might help you. Or else you can download each of the free platforms and
do a trial run all by yourself to decide what suits you the best as per your requirement.

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 Word Press Joomla Dupal
Best for Ease of use and flexibility, More advanced More content and
particularly for news or websites with complex structure flexibility for
blog websites data organization needs users with more
technical knowledge
Pricing as Free Free Free
Reviewed
Ease of Easy Intermediate
Intermediate
Setup/Use
Advantage Very user friendly Very stable and Best user admin for
versatile managing large
Extensive SEO integration
One code base can amounts of data
Most themes are fully
support multiple sites powerful
responsive
Easily scalable and Best for e-commerce
Largest user community
enterprise ready Large and active
Most free themes and Best for speed and developer community
plugins
performance Wide range of plugin
Free themes & plugins and extension types
Free themes & plugins
Disadvantage Prone to security Smaller developer Fewest free themes and
Updates community plugins
Speed Steeper technical Plugin compatibility
learning curve issues aren’t
uncommon

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3.2. Conclusion

CMS (Content Management System) is a software program that helps us to develop and maintain
the website easier and faster way. These days there are several CMS available varying based on
functionalities and platforms. Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are the three most popular CMS.
Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are all fantastic content management systems. Drupal and Joomla
come with many more built-in features than WordPress. However, WordPress beats them with
its ease of use, huge global community, plugins and themes. We feel that most non developer
users would find it much easier to build with WordPress than Joomla or Drupal.

All three of the web’s most popular CMS have a lot in common in terms of technology,
philosophy, and community.

WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are all free and open source software licensed. All three of them
use themes and templates for visual appearance of sites, and plugins, modules, or extensions for
extending features.

They all support MySQL as their database management system. WordPress exclusively supports
only MySQL, while Joomla and Drupal support other database management systems.

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References
 https://wpastra.com › good-website-design
 https://shortiedesigns.com › blog › 10-top-principles-effecti...
 http://www.cms.co.uk/types/
 Understanding Content Management A CM Domain White Paper By Bob Boiko
 Clara Benevolo and Serena Negri , Evaluation of Content Management Systems (CMS):
a Supply Analysis ,Clara
 Benevolo and Serena Negri ,DiTEA, University of Genoa, Italy
 http://www.diamondwebsolutions.com/pages/assetimages/info_wheel.gif
 http://www.crocusinfotech.com/images/content-management-system.jpg
 http://www.bccfalna.com/ebooks/wp-content/uploads/ebooks/2014/04/How-WordPress-
Works-
 https://www.incapsula.com/blog/cms-security-tips.htm

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