The priceline app would of been cool too. I guess we'll just have to wait. Maybe in a year when Android phones are all over all major carriers, they'll have realized they need to release their apps for both platforms.

Some things never change.

(Kidding…of COURSE. I love Cheapskate, by the way. A guy in the office here was running up to Best Buy to get that 19-inch monitor you blogged about the other day.)

Happy to try and answer your questions.

What is the relationship between PHP, SQL and the various CMS’s? Do all CMS’s rely on them? Would any use Filemaker for instance?

PHP and MySQL are the most common combination of scripting language (PHP) and database technology (MySQL) used on the Web for blogging applications, though certainly not the only ones.

I imagine Filemaker Pro could be used, but it’s not a terribly robust backend database for that sort of application…nor is it as frequently found available from ISPs on hosted accounts. (A quick search of the Filemaker Pro solutions network doesn’t net any results in English for “blogging.”) I use Filemaker on a daily basis for ad tracking at our newspaper, but haven’t come across a blogging application written for it (and, to be honest, I’m not sure what scripting hooks exist in that sense).

That said, many blogging solutions use other scripting languages (Ruby on Rails, Perl, Java, Python) and database technologies (Postgres, Oracle, etc.), it’s just that the most common blogging tools that are installed by end-users seem to gravitate to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) combinations.

You mentioned that Wordpress for instance is written in php.
So the CMS interfaces allows users to engage php scripts that access SQL data bases? When I post something the command actually activates a script that creates an SQL record much as I would if I accessed the data base directly?

Yup. And when the CMS is accessed by an end user, it accesses that database and drops the data found there (your entry, date information, author information, categories) into an XHTML template and displays it to the user’s browser.

Do all CMS’s have a search feature that access the underlying database?
Is it a complete keyword search? How does this relate to TAGGING content?

Generally they do have search features, although the robustness of that feature depends on the programmers of the blogging tool. Some might cheat for speed and search less than the whole entry; others might cleverly index your entries and search against them.

This doesn’t quite relate to tagging — tagging is sort of a freeform categorization that enables you to assign keywords as metadata to your entries. (In some cases, the CMS might allow the end-user to tag items as well.) That’s for convenience in retrieving those human-tagged items more than anything else…click the tag “Apple” and all items with that tag can be displayed by the CMS, even if they’re in different categories (perhaps News, Reviews, Features, Want Ads or whatever).

What does mean to have multiple databases? Are they independent or is there a relation?

I’m not sure where I got into multiple databases in the book, but it’s true that ExpressionEngine, for instance, prides itself on being able to create multiple tables (or “blogs”) within a database that can then be related to one another via a given identifying field. Create an “events” blog, for instance, and one of the fields can access the “venues” blog; you can then display information about a venue and its associated events on the same page.

(See the upcoming events section on this page: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/jfp.php/events/location/57)

If, for instance, I wanted to have an archive of resource articles (not posts) would these be stored in a searchable database? And would a search find these article as wells any posts/ comments that were related?

They should, although again the usefulness of the results will depend on the robustness of the CMS in question. I, for instance, have opted to rely on Google for searching the Jackson Free Press website; from the homepage, a Google search is used for the archives.

Google Search of Jackson Free Press site for keywords “Frank Melton”.

That’s not for having done any particularly exhausting testing of EE’s internal search capabilities, but rather just a “sense” on my part from using both that Google might be better at newspaper archives.

Hope that helps…let me know if you have other questions.