Now we know who is making website for PEI political parties, what about the underlying software, the so-called “content management system” that parties use to maintain their websites.

For every site on the web, you can “view source” in your web browser to see the “source code” of the website – the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that together define how the website looks and what its contents are. By examining the source of Island political party websites, it’s easy to tell what content management systems they’re using:

The clues I used to help me identify which CMS each party is using are as follows:

Drupal

In the HTML source of the site it’s explicity stated:

<meta name="Generator" content="Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)" />

In addition, the login page for the CMS is at the standard Drupal location of /user.

It’s worth noting that the Green Party is keeping its Drupal 7 installation up to date: if you visit the CHANGELOG.txt for the site, you’ll see that it’s running version 7.35, which reflect a mid-March security patch.

CMS Made Simple

The site is currently offline, but by searching Google for cache:http://movingforwardpei.ca/ I was able to retrieve an older cached version. There’s no explicit evidence for what the CMS is, but references to “modules” called “MenuManager” and “Showtime,” both of which are party of that CMS, are a good sign.

WordPress

A set of clues, including this explicit statement (which only appears on the NDP WordPress):

<meta name=generator content="WordPress 4.1.1"/>

and frequent references in the HTML source to “wp-content”, a commonly-used WordPress directory.

In addition, the login pages for both the PC and NDP sites are in the standard place at /wp-login.php.

As with the Green Party and Drupal, both the PC and NDP WordPress sites are running the latest version, 4.1.1, released in mid-February.