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There are so many open source solution out there today, I'm pretty sure most of you have heard about community portal like Joomla and Drupal. They were powerful in creating English based portal website and it can be done with required of literally programming knowledge, all you have to know before the installation is how to create a MySQL user account and MySQL database from your hosting control panel, when they are set you are good to go, just enter the MySQL account and database info in the installation wizard and fill up the rest of the fields which required during the installation, follow the installation guideline and in just the matter of few steps your portal will be created and ready for you to administrative it through the admin backend system that required no programming or web design skill at all.
Below is the list of popular open source solution by category:
Community Portal (CMS):
- Drupal
- Geeklog
- Joomla 1.5
- Joomla
- Mambo
- PHP-Nuke
- phpWCMS
- phpWebSite
- Post-Nuke
- Siteframe
- Xoops
Discussion Boards (or Forum)
- Phpbb
- SMF
- Discuz (Chinese)
- PhpWin(Chinese)
Blogs
- Wordpress
- B2evolution
- Neclues
E-Commerce
- OS Commerce
- Zen Cart
- CubeCart
Customer Relationship
- Crafty Syntax Live Help
- Help Center Live
- osTicket
- PHP Support Tickets
- Support Services Manager
Image Galleries
- 4Images Gallery
- Coppermine Photo Gallery
- Gallery
Project Management
Wiki
- TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
- PhpWiki
Other Scripts
- Moodle
- Open-Realty
- phpAdsNew
- PHPauction
- phpFormGenerator
- WebCalendar
- And the list goes...
As you can see from the above list, there are plenty of it, choose one that fit your requirements and stick with it, you going to need some time to build up the contents and gain the community member. They all mostly in English languge and if you are looking for Chinese based open source solution you can actually got some from Comsenz, a China based company that develop open source application, some of their famous application like Discuz, UcenterHome, X-Space and SupeSite, they are being widely used among chinese community, you can see we have some website developed using their system, such as GoTravelForum.com and MegaAds.info
I thought I heard you said “Okay, I have it installed already, now what”. Now what you have to do is to login to your admin backend system to configure your website, you can do lot of things with it, you will first need to do the basic configuration such as change the website title and some other features then follow by setup the section and category because they are going to be the structure of your website that hold the most valuable thing, the contents (content is the king as I’m sure you all have heard). Once you are done with the important setup, play around your admin backend system to discover other features that might spice up your website.
Dress it Up
Once you get familiar with your admin backend system, its time to dress it up. Design is important to catch the attention eye of your visitor and yourself too. Research show a website with an eye catching design received more traffic than a website with tons of functionality but poor in design, you have to admit that people like to see beautiful things, being simple design is different than being ugly design, your design can be simple but it just cant be too ugly, to become simple but nice you have to create the website by yourself, things to concern such as the layout, navigation and how it flows, but with those open source applications you just cant really make too much changes, major changes meaning re-construct the whole thing and it really time consuming and required more time than to create a new application by yourself. Note that all applications above came with it own default design and they are pretty much boring, you will wonder why the other people’s so fancy and mine just so….ugly. To dress it up means to design it, you can do it in 2 ways which is download and install the template of your application or design it, neither one of them ain't going to be easy, you need to have deep understanding of web design and development to do that, especially with HTML and programming languages such PHP or ASP, its been known that creating a whole new system by ourselves is far more easier than to modify the others one.
Some applications just have few available template, say your favorite color is blue and so you wanna fill your website with blue but I tell you what you have to be lucky enough to get the template that you like, then you might want to refer to the user manual on how to install the template and replace it with the default one, you can install new template to some application easily when they can support plugin, usually you will find this option under ‘style’ or ‘template’ from your admin backend system, but some don’t have plugin option, like OSCommerce, so in that case you will need to know how to use FTP program to upload it and before you do make sure you know how to backup it because when it not compatible with the system and cause your website in error you know how to draw it back to default. You have to accept the fact that not all templates is really what you want, when you want to enhance it to a little better and match your taste you will need to “hack” it, since they are open source so you can actually modify it, again, its not an easy job.
So, either you leave the original design as default theme or if you want to change it either by installing new template or modify it by yourself, make sure it is nice enough, at the least make it look neat or it will end up like 7 years old kid’s website. When you get yourself into the modification you will be amazed with how it is built up, you will be impressed with how little module combined together become a great application, you will show respect to the coder and the designer because you know its not something that your 12 years old cousin can do it.
Promotion
After you have your website installed and dressed up, now body is going to know it because it won’t go to knock the door of other until you decide to promote it. They are many ways of promotion, run the google and I bet you can speed at least 3 days to digest the resources. Website promotion is not what we going to talk in this article, but to make your open source application become promoteable is what we concern here. You will need to equip your website with suitable title, meta keywords and description, usually you can find these fields in your admin backend system, so you just need to fill up the blank, but when you cant find the option to do so you will have to do it by yourself, you have to find out which file serve the header of the application, typically they will named like something “header.html/asp/php”, “top.html/asp/php”. When your website completed with meta tags, follow the steps you learn in website promotion to promote your website.
Maintenance
If you running community website and received good response, it’s like you are having a big fat dinosaur as pet, it will consume lot of web space and bandwidth, server uptime is important to keep your website alive 24/7, the speed of server make sure your community members can surf smoothly without hours of waiting, this will kill popularity and turn your website into the old lady category. Backup is important too, so when anything bad happened you can do the restore. Backup in dynamic website like those open source applications is to backup the database and the edited template files. You can set the auto backup on in your hosting control panel or you can do the backup manually. Conclusion
Though with those handy open source applications, running a website is not something easy as you might thought, web design & development is not something that your 12 years old cousin can handle it well, you have to possessed skills in software development life cycle, graphic design, programming, good sense of design, internet marketing and etc. You need to have deep interest to do all those things, like I always said website is a combination of art & technology, you will first need to learn how to love and respect all work behind a website before you start everything.
* Please excuse all the typos and grammar mistake if any because my mother language is not English.
Author
Smith Tan - 1StopWeb800.com
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