Each time you create or edit an entry, a category, a user, etc., Dotclear triggers the recording of the new elements in a Database and puts them in relation with one another (e.g. this entry is linked to this category).

Each time a visitor requires the display of a page on your blog ¹⁾, Dotclear fetches the information in the database, processes it, formats it then displays (or provides) it.

The language used by Dotclear to process information is called PHP. To display/provide content, Dotclear uses XHTML (or XML), CSS and a touch of Javascript. The files used to process and display information are those you uploaded to your web space.

Dotclear uses PHP (version 5) and a database (PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite).

PHP is said to be a "dynamic" language for generating web pages on the server side (aren't you glad to know that?:p). In fact, it means that when you request to show a page, the "server" - the computer on the other end of the wire, on which the pages are stored - "computes" the page content to send it to your screen as a web page in XHTML format. Which is great, because your navigator doesn't understand PHP but is perfectly fluent in XHTML (or at least it should be).

What you will place on your server through your FTP access contains everything related to the presentation of your blog: where the entries, comments, and various links are placed in your page, and how these elements are displayed in the browser window.

So these files use the PHP and XHTML technologies, of course, but also CSS, for the graphic part of the layout and JavaScript, for some dynamic behaviors on the web page.

So now our content is ready to be put in light, but the content itself - entries, comments, information structure, etc. - is, just like Truth, out there. Our friend PHP actually "calls" it in the page from the database. That's also part of its job : sending information to be stored (e.g. when you create an entry or a visitor leaves a comment), and retrieving information to include it in the page.

During installation, the software automatically creates tables in a database (existing or created or the occasion, depending on your hosting). The initial installation creates 16 tables and names them starting with dc_ by default. They will contain the information related to the different blogs in your installation, and, of course, all the entries and comments.

Dotclear 2.0 API Documentation.