This post is for those of you who’d like to know a little more about what our site runs on. TheColbyEcho.com is built on top of a custom Content Management System made from scratch in object oriented PHP by the Echo Tech Team. The Echo CMS is comprised of four layers.

1. Display - The Display layer is the outward-facing code in the site. When you view our source, all of what you see is generated by the display layer. If we were building with Legos, the Display layer would contain each individual Lego.
2. Layout - The Layout layer is what organizes and calls the Display layer modules. Think of the Layout layer as the instructions for building a Lego house.
3. Data - The Data layer is what interacts with our MySQL database. Whenever we need to grab a user’s information or the body text of an article, we’ll dip down into the Data layer.
4. Internal Services - Our Internal Services layer deals with things like reverse-engineering the URI from Apache and configuring our database.