25 Open Source Web Applications
Here are 11 ideas (and 25 apps) to make better use of your webspace. They are all open source alternatives to major Web 2.0 applications that you can install on your own web server. Most require PHP and MySQL. All are free.
Why? By taking control of the services you use online, you can increase your understanding of PHP, MySQL, and how web applications work. You also get advertising-free (or subscription-free) versions of your favourite sites, and the ability to backup your data easily. In addition, with many of these scripts, you get to fully customise the software with your own unique look.
Blog
Publish your online journal, share your thoughts, write about your favourite hobby or promote your business. Blogs are everywhere these days, but they show no signs of decreasing in number. By hosting your own blog, you get far more control over the look and feel. You can download themes from the hundreds available online, but also you can extend the functionality of the software through freely available plugins.
Recommended software: Wordpress
Hosted alternatives: Blogger, Typepad.
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, delete and edit content. Chances are you’ve already seen one of the biggest of it’s kind, Wikipedia, but with your very own wiki you can share it among friends and use it as a collaborative knowledge base, or use it to document your product, or as a personal notebook or even as a company intranet.
Recommended software: Dokuwiki, MediaWiki
Hosted alternatives: StikiPad, Wetpaint
Forum
Nothing gets people talking, more than a forum. A forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, bulletin boards or simply forums. Most forums have regular users, which can be a great way to build virtual communities. Forums can be focused around a specific product, lifestyle or genre, or can be much more informal and general.
Recommended software: Vanilla, PhpBB, PunBB, YaBB
Hosted alternatives: Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups
Photo Gallery
If you have photos you want to share with friends, family and the wider internet, there are plenty of services on the web that can do that for you. However, some people like to retain more control over their own photos, and not be restricted by the terms & conditions of some of the big sites. Sure, the big sites can offer exposure and a sense of community, but that’s not for everyone. There are plenty of cool tools to allow you to host your own photo galleries or photo blogs.
Recommended software: Filebrowser, zenphoto, folderblog, Plogger, Coppermine
Hosted alternatives: Flickr, Zoomr
Mailing Lists
If you run a business, or a hobby website, often you’ll want to be able to easily communicate your latest news and updates to your visitors. For some companies, RSS feeds have replaced the need for contact by email, but there are a wealth of people out there who don’t understand RSS, and they outnumber those who do, and sometimes only an email will do. While there are tools online to maintain mailing lists, why not run your own directly from your own domain name.
Recommended software: PHPList
Hosted alternatives: Campaign Monitor
Webmail
Hands up who has a Gmail or Yahoo email account? Even though many of you probably have POP3 accounts with your ISP, you favour the web based versions because they provide ease of access when you are at work, at school, etc. Well, you can actually install a webmail system on your own webspace, and take advantage of the services they offer without sacrificing your cool domain name.
Recommended software: Roundcube, SquirrelMail
Hosted alternatives: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail
RSS Reader
If you don’t use a news reader (or aggregator), they can be a great way to keep track of updates to your favourite sites. Almost every major website has an RSS feed that updates whenever they publish new content. By hosting an RSS reader on your own webspace, you can access your subscriptions from anywhere, rather than just when you are at your computer.
Recommended software: Gregarius
Hosted alternatives: Bloglines, Google Reader
Bookmarks
Social bookmarking is a great way to share interesting sites you’ve found with friends. By adding tags to each site you find, you allow other users to browse links by genre. Usually most services offer some way of subscribing to the bookmarks of a specific user. If you’ve ever used del.icio.us, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It also means you can access your own bookmarks from a remote location. By installing a social bookmarks system on your own server, you can do something different and stand out from the crowd.
Recommended software: Scuttle, Sabros.us
Hosted alternatives: del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Furl
Tasks
As an alternative to keeping a paper to do list, you can keep all your upcoming tasks online. You can even order tasks by priority and deadline, or organize them by context. For business use, you can have multiple users too and allow sorting of tasks by project. The beauty of running this from your own webserver, is that you are not reliant on third-party services, and you know it will always be there when you need it.
Recommended software: TaskFreak!, Tudu Lists
Hosted alternatives: TaDa List, Bla-bla List, Remember The Milk
Social News
Social, democratic, news sites (such as Digg, Reddit, etc) are great places to find the latest news stories and websites. URL’s submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. There are plenty of good reasons to host your own social news site, such as narrowing down the subject matter to a specific topic, or limiting the users to those on your LAN or Intranet.
Recommended software: Pligg, PHPDug
Hosted alternatives: Digg, Reddit, Newsvine
Calendar
There are 2 easy ways to manage calenders online. One is to use software on your computer such as iCal (Mac) or Sunbird (PC/Linux) and then install software on your server to parse the calendar file and display it online. Alternatively you can install a script that lets you actually edit and maintain your calendar directly on your website. Useful if you need to make changes when you are at a remote location.
Recommended software: PHP iCalendar, phpEventCalendar
Hosted alternatives: Gmail, Kiko
While all these applications are free, you will need some webspace with PHP and MySQL support. There are two options:
- Find a good webhost such as Segment Publishing, Media Temple or Textdrive. This is going to cost you.
- Run your own web server yourself. It’s a little more tricky to install and configure, but if you are running Mac OS X (or Linux), you can quite easily install Apache, PHP & MySQL or run MAMP/LAMP and host all this software on your own computer.
If you have a static IP address and a domain name (try Pairnic for domains) you can even setup a web address with a subdomain for each project. If you want to do everything for free, or you don’t have a static IP, you can even get a free subdomain using a service like DynDNS.
Conclusion
If you want to do something more interactive with your online prescence, or want to move away from the 3rd party hosted services, I hope the above list has given you some good ideas to build upon. Wikipedia is a good starting point for finding out more.
While I haven’t listed every service, or alternative, I welcome suggestions for glaring omissions in the comments below.
thanks
[...] to support HTML email with pictures and stuff (SM is plain text only). I found RoundCube reading THIS blog which has a list of 25 open source web apps on there which all look pretty [...]
Pligg ftw, the new version really rocks but themes are so hard to find…