When a person with a dream of making a online carrier enters this fascinating world of codes and services, is always confused? There are lot of confusions that they are having in their mind, one such confusion is with the platform and the mode of presence.
Let’s talk about some great open source software’s for this purpose. But before moving to this you will be requiring a hosting package, to host the open source software’s.
Linux Hosting
Over here for hosting we recommend Linux Hosting for open source lovers, as most of the open source software and services are developed in open source languages (like PHP) and performance is great over Linux Platform. In Linux there are various hosting operation available like fedora, centos etc. Best performance comes on Centos and is recommended from our end.
Control Panel
In the hosting next comes the choice of the control panel from where you will be managing your domain and the files related to your website. There are few choices available in the market for control panel over Linux hosting, like Cpanel and Lxadmin panel. Our recommendation is for Cpanel, as its a undisputed leader and had a market capitalization of 75% compared to other panels. For Lxadmin as we have stated in the past regarding the vulnerabilities found in it, so its a no from our end but its a great panel to work on as it resources consume a very little 15MB RAM.
Open source Software’s
Well there are hundred’s of open sources available for making a website, we are also running over one such open source called wordpress. We will be talking about few such top open sources and why we recommend them.
Blogs
There are two best options available in blogging as per your requirement. One is blogger.com, its free and no investment. If you are a simple writer and don’t want to waste time in managing things your self, its best for you. Similarly, wordpress.com provides free blog hosting service just like blogger.com. Now comes the interesting part that makes wordpress the best, are its plug-in and the support available for them. Moreover you could host wordpress over your servers with full control, there are lot of great features in wordpress for which i can write a new post. Wordpress can also be used as CMS.
CMS (Content Management System)
Their are two tough competitors present in this open source range also. One is the Joomla and second one is Drupal recently adopted by white house. In this category we recommends Joomla. If you are new to Joomla it could be hard for you to manage, for this we again recommend wordpress as you could customize it to CMS and their are lot of great themes available for it.
Forum
These days a lot of discussion boards are being developed instead of fully functional and properly managed websites. But i recommend forums as a part of a CMS website, as forums had a poor SEO and alone it could destroy your online presence. Moreover, optimizing a forum for Search Engine is a tough Job.
The available open source software in the forum category are PHPBB, SMF, Icy Phoenix. They all have a bad SEO, so i will not give a hardcore recommendation for a single one. Well if you look at the support available for the three PHPBB leads the race far ahead, and a lot of mod’s are also available for it. If we look at a better SEO among the three, Icy Phoenix is a good choice; but the problem with it is the amount of server resources it utilizes when it operates. Hence, resulting higher cost of operations.
Concluding all the three categories of the open sources covered above, best option of managing a website is through blogging software’s. Specifically wordpress, as it will be meeting all your requirements, and its very simple to manage and operate.
And all the Open sources that are detailed above are being developed in PHP. Hence their are plug-ins available for their interoperability and inter connectivity.
