Over the past couple of years, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the open source software available for the many websites I operate. For many years, I looked around the internet for ready-made applications, written either in Perl or PHP. And more often than not, was highly disappointed by what I’d found. In the past couple of years, though, I’ve come across many good applications that have proven to be attractive, professional, usable, flexible (easily modified) and relatively easy to install. Some have proven to be better than others, but overall, there has been a big leap forward in quality and popularity.
First of all, I should give a tip of the hat to WordPress, which is one of the most popular blogging applications on the web. I use WordPress here at Rudy’s Corner, and have been using it on an increasing number of sites. I don’t always use it as a true “blog”, either: it works well as a simple CMS (content management system), where any person set up with editing privileges can contribute and manage content, and comments can be disabled. There are many plugins and skins available, and it is moderately easy to modify its appearance. Update releases are regular, and it is actively maintained.
Back in 2001, my WebBBS forum at A&M Corner was beginning to show its age, and also getting hit by spammers. After looking at a couple of options, phpBB stood out as one of the better forum packages out there. The big problem, though, was that development on a new version was at a standstill, and within a couple of years, phpBB2 was left far behind. It took six years for the release of phpBB3, but it is well worth the upgrade. It is a much more flexible and modern forum system than the old one, a lot more secure, and more resistant to spambots. I only have it installed on a couple of sites now, but am beginning a slow upgrade process to move all of them up to phpBB3.
I also have to give an honorable mention to SMF–Simple Machines Forum. Due to my frustration with phpBB’s lagging development, I used SMF on a couple of sites, and it has proven to be a solid performer in its own right. It even has a couple of neat features that phpBB does not offer.
In some cases, if you can’t deal with the rest, download the best! While it’s a bit of a pain to configure, MediaWiki is arguably the best wiki software available today. Beyond flexibility is the familiarity: if you’ve ever visited Wikipedia, you’ve used MediaWiki. For those of us who develop sites, it is great to have packages like MediaWiki upon which we can build major portions of a website, without having to reinvent the wheel. (Ditto WordPress in that regard.)
For a full-fledged CMS to build a site around, I’m liking what I see in Drupal. I have not yet used it much, but I did find a note in one of my test posts, saying I liked it better than Joomla. It is a very elaborate system to set up, but it does provide a backbone to create an entire content-filled site.
Social netowrking is the big fad today, and I located a package that performs similarly to MySpace and Facebook. It’s called Elgg. It has been around since 2004, and offers many of the features that the popular social networking sites offer. Installation was easy, and navigation seemed basic enough for anyone to operate.
There are many other good packages out there. Fortunately for me, the ones I’ve listed above are written in PHP and powered by MySQL, so I can easily modify them if needed. Open source packages certainly have improved over the past several years, and today it’s more of a challenge to choose which good package you want to install, vs. having to find the least of the worst, as I have done in the past.