Tim Hilliard

So having been in the web caper for a little while now I thought it was time to discuss my experiences of open source.

Probably my most profound experience in the open source arena came about when I was asked to do a project in Drupal, a highly configurable and customisable CMS package. After a little experimentation I was soon able to harness the true potential of Drupal and now use Drupal for all of my standard CMS installations. With a user base of over 400 000 users, Drupal has become a powerhouse in the world of content managed systems. Overall I would say that Drupal was a truly positive experience for me and has allowed me to grow significantly in the last 2 years as a developer.

I could keep going on about different open source packages but then this post would become infintely long so instead what I will do now is list all of the open source packages that I use and give a brief overview of why I like it.

• Drupal – as mentioned before a powerful CMS solution.
• Magento – a truly fantastic ecommerce solution that gives store owners a fantastic set of tools out of the box for setting up their own online store.
• Wordpress – a great piece of blogging software that is also being used to run this blog.
• jQuery – a powerful set of javascript classes and functions that make writing javascript for your web applications a breeze.
• Apache – probably the greatest web server going around (in my opinion anyway).
• PHP – an Apache extension that allows for powerful serverside scripting.
• MySQL – my favourite database.
• WampServer – a great WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack for development on a Windows machine.
• Notepad++ – a quite powerful text editor that is great for coding.
• Subversion – quite possibly the most important backup / versioning tool for any developer.
• USVN – a great interface to Subversion which has project and user controls.
• CentOS – my personal favourite linux distro, of course there are a lot of great ones out there but this one is essentially RedHat rebranded and repackaged.
• TortoiseSVN – an excellent windows shell extension for using subversion.
• FileZilla – relatively powerful FTP program.
• Poderosa – great for creating a secure shell connection.
• 7zip – a great piece of software for compression, is compatible with most formats.

I hope some of these packages can be useful to you.