What Platform is Powering That Site?

WordPress? Joomla? Drupal?

Have you ever wondered what platform is powering a specific site? Sometimes its pretty simple to just right click and go to ‘Inspect Element’ to view the source code, where you can then pinpoint what platform the site was built on based on the file structure and included scripts. But there are other times when its extremely hard to pin point what platform the site is using. Developers do this mainly for security reasons. If your not able to tell what platform the site is developed on, how are you ever going to know where to login?

percentage of CMS used to power sites

Key for useage chart

As you can see from the image above, just a little over 20% of the entire web is powered by WordPress alone. Following behind that with a whopping 9.4% is Joomla.

Chrome Sniffer

In comes the Google Chrome extension, ‘Chrome Sniffer’. What this little tool does is install an extension into your chrome browser that then runs through a sites core files and pin points what platform the site was built on. It alerts the user what platform the site was built on by placing a little icon in the URL bar. This is quite a cool little tool that helps save you time when digging through a sites source code.

This is what the URL browser bar shows when visiting my home page with the ‘Chrome Sniffer’ extension active:

As you can see over in the right hand side of the URL bar, a small WordPress icon appears the show that the site is powered by the WordPress platform.

If no CMS platform is powering the site the extension will show an icon representing some of the scripts that are loaded. For example you may see a jQuery or Modernizr icon. This is what the site http://www.dangersoffracking.com/ shows in my browser bar for a jQuery powered site.

Download Link

Chrome Sniffer

But I’m Not Using Chrome….Now What?

I forgive you for not using the best browser on the market…but hopefully your using Fire Fox. And if you are, you’re in luck! A similar extension is available for FireFox over at http://www.wappalyzer.com. It’s not exactly the same as Chrome Sniffer, but it gets the job done. Now next time you need to know what platform is powering what site you can just as easily glance up at your browser bar and find out in a fraction of a second saving you the most valuable of our assets……time.