Fantastico makes installing script so simple, does it makes script installation service like us obsolete?

Well, yes and no.

Yes to the extent that simple installation and testing can easily be accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. In fact, as mention in the previous post, Wordpress installation is already so simple.

No because we provide a customized service. Perhaps your host don’t provide Fantastico. Perhaps you want to install an application not provided by Fantastico. Perhaps there is a unique install situation that requires human decision. We are here to fill that gap. Programs can’t beat experience just yet.

Taking this into account, if your hosting provider has Fantastico and you still require our service to install a script provided by Fantastico, we will install it for you with personal attention for just $10.

Just mention this in the order and we will refund you the difference.

What are the scripts installed? Here is the list (list below is updated as of this post date):

Blogs:

• b2evolution (2.4.5) (website)
• Nucleus (3.32) (website)
• WordPress (2.7.1) (website)

Classifieds:

• Noah’s Classifieds (V8 (3.2.0)) (website)

Portals/CMS:

• Drupal (6.10) (website)
• Geeklog (1.5.1) (website)
• Joomla 1.5 (1.5.10) (website)
• Joomla (1.0.15) (website)
• Mambo Open Source (4.6.5) (website)
• PHP-Nuke (7.9) (website)
• phpWCMS (1.1-RC4 Rev. A) (website)
• phpWebSite (0.10.2) (website)
• Post-Nuke (0.764) (visit site)
• Siteframe (3.2.3) (website)
• Typo3 (4.2.1) (website)
• Xoops (2.3.1) (website)

Customer Support:

• Crafty Syntax Live Help (2.15.0) (website)
• Help Center Live (2.1.7) (website)
• osTicket (1.3.1) (website)
• PerlDesk (4.012.2) (Commercial, needs license) (website)

Discussion Boards:

• phpBB (3.0.4) (website)
• SMF (1.1.7) (website)

E-Commerce:

• CubeCart (3.0.17) (website)
• OS Commerce (2.2 Release Candidate 2a + buySAFE) (website)
• Zen Cart (1.3.8a) (website)

FAQ:

• FAQMasterFlex (1.51) (website)

Hosting Billing:

• AccountLab Plus (2.8 r14) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
• phpCOIN (1.4.4) (website)

Image Galleries:

• 4images Gallery (1.7.6) (website)
• Coppermine Photo Gallery (1.4.20) (website)
• Gallery (2.3) (website)

Mailing List:

• PHPlist (2.10.9) (website)

Polls and Surveys:

• Advanced Poll (2.03) (website)
• LimeSurvey (1.72) (website)
• phpESP (1.8.2) (website)

Project Management:

• PHProjekt (5.2.2) (website)
• dotProject (2.1.2) (website)

Site Builders:

• Soholaunch Pro Edition (4.9.3 r17) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
• Templates Express (website)

Wiki:

• PhpWiki (1.2.11) (website)
• TikiWiki (2.4) (website)

Other Scripts:

• Dew-NewPHPLinks (2.0.1.0b SEF w/Thumbshots) (website)
• Moodle (1.9.4) (website)
• Open-Realty (2.5.6) (website)
• phpAdsNew (2.0.11-pr1) (website)
• PHPauction (3.2) (website)
• phpFormGenerator (2.09c) (website)
• WebCalendar (1.2.0) (website)

From the experiences of installing, using and testing many difference CMS, we found CMS Made Simple to be simple to use and flexible. As with any system, there are pros and cons. A CMS has to be choosen based on the fit to the task at hand. For a somewhat smaller content site like ours, CMS Made Simple fits perfectly.

With the CMS backend, we can manage the content easier compared to before when we maintain the pages  by directly editing a mix of PHP code and template. We also make use of features like global content block and custom user defined tags for some repetitive content blocks.

In this update we added to each script page a showcase of sites using the same open source script that we can help you install. For example, on the CMS Made Simple page we found 2 sites that was built using CMS Made Simple.

If you have a site that is using these open source scripts and would like to be listed, just follow the simple steps on the page itself.

Hope that you find our update useful. Your feedback and suggestion to make our site even better is most welcomed!

Why yet another web hosting review?
Because

• we are sick of affiliate links, sponsored pages masquerading as review,
• we are tired of copied about-us page pretending to be a review,
• a bunch of user ratings cannot beat actually checking out the service and kicking the tires for ourselves,
• we have criteria that other reviews do not cover

What are our criteria? Why we think they are important?

• Good support – should be timely, knowledgeable and polite.
  We are not expecting the hosting support to ace here, just performance at a reasonably acceptable level. Since we know what we are doing and if hosting company know what they are doing too, there is no need for excessive support anyway.
• Honor their money back and any claims/promises (if any).
  We will be asking our money back and checking out any other gimmicks to see if they live up to their claim.
• SSH access
  Without SSH we are like working with one hand tied behind our back. Typically hosting companies that allows ssh are also more technically competent.
• Allow unlimited domain - at least a large enough number
• Attractive pricing
  We are not looking for the cheapest here. Value for money and generally inline with what others are offering. We think a ideal entry level is a monthly payment of less that $9 (not $9/month if you sign up for 3 years).

This would also be a good exercise for us to get to know more about the hosting offerings out there and also to sharpen our skill.

In closing, we want to take this opportunity to recommend you our current hosting provider RapidVPS. In our opinion, they already ace all our criteria so we will not be doing an actual review about them. We had been using them for close to 2 years now. In full disclosure, you should know we are not related to them in any way except as happy paying customer. Also the link above does earn us a referral, but only if you are happy with their service and stay signed-up (which we think you will). So give it a try.

ps. Any host you would like us to try?

Instead of just bookmarking links, we do our best to give each link a comment so that you see a little more details about the script than just a link.

Also collected are web tools and services including those omnipresence Web2.0 services.

So if you are on del.icio.us, add us to your network or recommend some related links to us.

Looking for ways to stop spams on your blog, wiki or forum. Using a reCAPTCHA plugin could help.

reCAPTCHA is a interesting idea that gives a new twist to the war against spam. This post will give a quick introduction to reCAPTCHA and you can learn more about it here.

CAPTCHAs are those colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of web forms. Their purpose is to separate humans from spam scripts.

Spammers usually use scripts to spam thousands of post in forum and blog comments. However most scripts are not as clever as human eyes in identifying the characters so they are blocked. Nice try spammers.

reCAPTCHA took this idea a step further. Instead of throwing away the text you had correctly entered, it is actually used to digitalize books. Books are scanned and broken down into words. As users enter the words in the CAPTCHA, the content of a book is slowly being typed out by users all over the world! (Curious about how this is possible? Read about the technical details on how it is done on reCAPTCHA website.)

reCAPTCHA is available as a PHP library and as plugins for WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, vBulletin, Joomla, Drupal.

If your blog, wiki for forum is suffering from spam, using reCAPTCHA could stop the spam. At the same time you are joining the worldwide effort to digitize books. What can be more simple!

If you need assistance to install reCAPTCHA, send us a note.

On our website (www.opensourcer.com), we provide Script Installation & Upgrade Services. We can install and setup for you your very own blog, forum, wiki, or pretty much any script you want or need. Or, if you have some blog/forum/<script name here> that needs updating, we can help you with that too! If you don’t have time to update, upgrade, repair, etc. your scripts, we will do it for you.

All our installation and upgrade services are very affordable, professional, and fast. We invite you to take a look at our services page, FAQ, and homepage to find out more about us and what we do.

On our blog (www.opensourcer.com/blog), we talk about different scripts from the different categories (like blogs, forums, wikis, etc.).

We will be blogging about the latest news on scripts and web applications, as well as ways to improve, tweak, modify and customize your script for your maximum pleasure.