Detect the backend software of the current website

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When researching and developing websites, I usually browse various websites as my reference. I try to find every aspect and features of websites then combine them to implement on my websites or projects. There’re quite many of website’s aspect I try to explore, such as: layout & design, monetizing, the engine or CMS, how to maintenance, and many more.

One most important I try to explore is its engine, what is its engine?. This factor will affect the whole of website in the future. The CMS or engine also affect with the site features, so find the right engine is very important to meet a demand of website needs.

I found a great Firefox addon to detect the engine or backend software of the current website, it is Backend Software Information.

How it works

BackendInfo basically works by detecting URLs, strings and regular expressions. This ranges from typical html and CSS codes to certain directory and file-structures. It is easy to track changes in CSS, JS and html files between releases that can be used to identify the backends exact version.

BackendInfo is a “plugin framework”, every extension checks for a given backend by required URLs, and optionally a number of strings or regex patterns that have to be contained or not contained in this URL.

This extension adds an icon to the statusbar, that let’s you detect the backend and view detail information. The icon changes accordingly to the detection status.

Once a backend is found, the extension tries to identify the exact version. Currently, over 120 different versions from more than a dozen backend systems is supported.

Update

http://guess.scritch.org also does something similar. Just check it out!