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Open Source Software Guide
- by Garry Conn

If you are like me, you enjoy experimenting with different open source software for your website. In the past I have tried many different forums, blogs, and CMS programs. I am not sure how I ended up being a blog publisher using Wordpress. I do know this: Wordpress is very easy and simple to install as well as manage. It’s very stable and it’s backed with superior community support. But there is more!

In this article, I really want to open your eyes to other things. There is more to life than your Wordpress blog. There are many people out here in the blogosphere that have outgrown Wordpress and might not realize it. Do you find that you spend a lot of time trying to customize, tweak, and modify your Wordpress installation to do additional things Wordpress wasn’t really intended for? Do you want a stable and secure message board forum? Do you want to find a content management system? What about groupware, and wikis? Yes… I know, there are extensions for Wordpress that give you the ability to run wiki sites or even a message boards… but they are very basic and can be potentially buggy. I have written this article in hopes that it will help expand your creative efforts towards designing and creating a very powerful and unique online community.

Table of contents:

• Introduction:
• Content Management Systems:
  • Drupal
  • Geeklog
  • e107
  • Mambo
  • PHP-Nuke
  • Typo3
  • Xoops
• Message Board Forums:
• bbPress
• Mercury
• phpBB
• SMF (Simple Machines Forum)
• Wiki System Software:
• DokuWiki
• ErfanWiki
• MediaWiki
• WikkaWiki

Content Management Systems: Top

• Drupal: is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites. Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.
• Geeklog: is a PHP/MySQL based application for managing dynamic web content. “Out of the box”, it is a blog engine, or a CMS with support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection, and all the other vital features of such a system. The core Geeklog distribution can easily be extended by the many community developed plugins to radically alter its functionality. Available plugins include forums, image galleries, and many more. Geeklog is a weblog powered by PHP and MySQL. It allows you within minutes to set up a fully functioning dynamic website, and has many features to get you started.
• e107: is a content management system written in php and using the popular open source mySQL database system for content storage. It’s completely free and totally customizable, and in constant development.
• Mambo: is a full-featured content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Continue reading for a detailed feature list.
• PHP-Nuke: is a news automated system specially designed to be used in Intranets and Internet. The Administrator has total control of his web site, registered users, and he will have in the hand a powerful assembly of tools to maintain an active and 100% interactive web site using databases.
• TYPO3: is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendibility while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.
• XOOPS: is a program that allows administrators to easily create dynamic websites with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more. XOOPS is an acronym of extensible Object Oriented Portal System. Though started as a portal system, XOOPS is in fact striving steadily on the track of Content Management System. It can serve as a web framework for use by small, medium and large sites. A lite XOOPS can be used as a personal weblog or journal. For this purpose, you can do a standard install, and use its News module only. For a medium site, you can use modules like News, Forum, Download, Web Links etc to form a community to interact with your members and visitors. For a large site as an enterprise one, you can develop your own modules such as eShop, and use XOOP’s uniform user management system to seamlessly integrate your modules with the whole system.

Message Board Forums: Top

• bbPress: is plain and simple forum software, plain and simple. It’s easy to use, easy to administrate, fast and clean. But don’t let its simplicity deceive you; underneath the gleam, it’s got some powerful features and is highly customizable.
• MercuryBoard: is a powerful message board system dedicated to raw speed with a mixture of features, ease of use, and ease of customization coupled with expandability, and diverse language services. Now just over two years in the making, version 1.0.0 is an immensely stable, thoroughly tested, and well-written piece of internet software ready for any web server, running on PHP versions as low as 4.0.0 and MySQL versions as low as 3.22. The board was founded as a development project aimed at experimenting with the limitations and uses of the PHP language by Jason Warner and Mark Elliot. Over the past two years it has undergone, minimally, three major rewrites, numerous full database restructures, and several changes. The last year of development is clearly visible in an online CVS repository, and the software has been, and remains to be for all future development, open source, and free for you to use. The success of the board speed wise comes from constant optimization of code. The base structure of the application has been in place for almost six months now and has remained relatively unchanged. Several modules plug-in to the software, making it both extensible, and easy to figure out. The limits of PHP’s OOP protocols has been tested with our software, and an even mixture of both Jason’s and Mark’s code-theory has been authored into the methodology of how the software works. Admittedly, the software is not OOP in the ‘true’ sense of the theory, but uses several advantages of objects to facilitate an easy modified working base model. The board is easy to modify, as shown by several users even in the Beta stages of the product.
• phpBB: is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.
• SMF: An Elegant, Effective, Powerful and Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources. And, yes, it is free.

Wiki System Software: Top

• DokuWiki: is a standards compliant, simple to use Wiki mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files; no database is required.
• ERFAN WIKI: is powerful wiki engine without database supporting smart search, smart backup, wikipedia syntax, template, nice printable version , language and multiuser. plus an easy and secure installer.
• MediaWiki: is the collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and other projects. It’s designed to handle a large number of users and pages without imposing too rigid a structure or workflow.
• WikkaWiki: is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security.

I really hope that you will take something from this article. My goal is to help you expand your knowledge about open source software and to help you discover more options that are available to you and your online community that you maintain and develop. If you should have any comments, questions, or suggestions… please feel free to comment below. I appreciate your interest as well as your feedback!