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.
• Ubercart – 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. The software sits on top of Drupal to give users really powerful control over the look and feel of their site..
• 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 – an easy to use webserver for hosting all your php projects.
• PHP – a serverside scripting language that allows to create our dynamic sites.
• 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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under General, Website Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.