Home » Columns » Chris Holt's posts

Before reading further... Are you looking for great Linux hosting from a company that cares about GNU/Linux? Pick Dreamhost hosting, get a 10% bonus to the disk space (and support Free Software Magazine in the meantime!)

Fantastic Fantastico

Write a full post in response to this!


I just signed up at a hosting company to launch a new series of web sites and my primary consideration was their support for FOSS.

My number one issue was whether they had Cpanel available for my use, but specifically Cpanel with Fantastico. According to the developers site, Fantastico “is the leading autoinstaller for cPanel servers. With more than 10.000 installations, it provides more than one million end users the ability to quickly install dozens of the leading open source content management systems into their web space.”

I find that Fantastico, with its pleathora of FOSS, makes setting up a variety of web presences extremely easy; in fact (and I must admit my newbie status in all this), most of my exploration of free and open source programs has been through those made available by Fantastico. The ease of use with Cpanel’s integration of Fantastico makes it a slam dunk for any newbie to really begin to make some great web sites with ecommerce, photo gallery, auction, social networking, crm, and blogging capabilities.

There are of course a few open source programs I use that aren’t in Fantastico, but come with Ubuntu like Gimp, Open Office, Skype, GAIM, etc. However, these are mostly desktop programs and not web programs. I also use SugarCRM which is a great CRM which I also installed independently.

I’ve added my favorite programs from Fantastico below.

Joomla! (visit site)- a Content Management System (CMS) created by the same team that brought the Mambo CMS to its current state of stardom

Geeklog (visit site)

ZenCart (visit site) - another user-friendly open source shopping cart system

b2evolution (visit site)

Nucleus (visit site)

pMachine Free (visit site) - great tool for managing your own personal blogging site or mini portal

WordPress (visit site)

4images Gallery (visit site)- your own online photo gallery

Gallery (visit site)- probably the most popular image gallery script

Coppermine Photo Gallery (visit site)- a feature-rich photo gallery script with MySQL database, usermanagement, private galleries, automatic thumbnail creation, film strip, and a template system for customization

Moodle (visit site)- Moodle is a course management system designed to help educators create quality online courses

Noah’s Classifieds (visit site)- run your own Classified ads website!

Open-Realty (visit site)- professional but free tool for real estate agents to put their offers online

Fantastico has a lot more; all I can say is that it’s well…I won’t actually say that…!

Write a full post in response to this!

Similar articles

0

Do you like this post?
Vote for it!

Copyright information

This entry is (C) Copyright by its author, 2004-2008. Unless a different license is specified in the entry's body, the following license applies: "Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved and appropriate attribution information (author, original site, original URL) is included".

Biography

Chris Holt: Chris Holt specializes in consulting for Government and NGO public health and social services organizations about software to assist with case management and patient management systems. Check out his site at http://www.intuitech.biz.

Anonymous visitor's picture

SugarCRM?

Submitted by Anonymous visitor on Thu, 2007-03-15 07:00.

Vote!
0

Do you class SugarCRM as Open Source?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Chris Holt's picture

yes

Submitted by Chris Holt on Fri, 2007-03-16 20:59.

Vote!
0

Well I do as it is open and highly customizable...what do u think?

Anonymous visitor's picture

Out of date

Submitted by Anonymous visitor on Thu, 2007-04-05 21:53.

Vote!
0

The advice I was given by my hosters and on some website I googled to was NOT to use Fantastico because the programs there were not the latest versions.
For instance with phpBB I had to do all sorts of things to update the version Fantastico had on cPanel - had to do it because of security issues that phpBB were trying to solve.
Now I just find what I want and upload it - not as easy in the short term - but saves umpteen updates.



Other sites

Odiogo