Enhancing your website by utilising a range of powerful online applications such as content management systems, discussion forums, shopping carts or miscellaneous scripts is a great way to attract more visitors and increase your websites overall popularity and functionality. One thing that prevents many website owners from adding these applications, and improving their website, is the difficulty in actually doing so or a lack of the technical knowledge required to correctly complete the task. Fortunately an online application installer called Softaculous is available to make the installation of open source software a breeze, even for those with no prior technical knowledge. Softaculous is freely available for use via cPanel on all of our web hosting plans here at Digital Pacific, excluding the Personal Basic plan.
What Is Softaculous?
Softaculous is an automatic software installer that provides a quick one step installation of over 300 web based applications. By using Softaculous you avoid the tedious tasks of having to upload application files to your web server, creating databases and manually connecting the installed software to your database.
Along with it’s prime function of software installation, Softaculous also manages and maintains your software installations. In the event of an update being made available to any of the software you’ve installed via Softaculous, an automatic email will be sent to your nominated address with a notice about the update and an option to install it. This makes it easy for you to always keep up to date with all security patches and new features.
What Software Is Available Via Softaculous?
There are more than 300 applications available for installation within Softaculous spanning across 17 categories such as shopping carts, content management systems, games, file management and online discussion forums. Some of the top applications include:
WordPress
Wordpress is an extremely popular, and one of the most widely used, open source blogging and content management application. WordPress provides an avenue for you to easily publish, edit, share and maintain content and media on your website through the use of an easy to use administration dashboard.
On it’s own, WordPress is powerful and houses most of the features you’ll need, but with the ability to install more than 28,000 third party plugins you can turn your website into just about anything you desire. Some of the plugins available allow you to improve your websites search engine optimisation, add enhanced media uploading and sharing abilities, or turn your WordPress installation into an online shopping gateway or a complete social media platform. With a powerful and reliable WordPress hosting plan from Digital Pacific you’ll be able to begin sharing your thoughts and knowledge with the world.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop is a completely free and open source e-commerce solution that allows you to set up an online store and start selling your products with ease. The software, officially released in 2007, has been downloaded more than 3.2 million times and is used to power some of the largest online stores on the web.
Prestashop has more than 300 powerful in-built features that are designed to make your experience selling goods online as easy as possible. Many of these features enhance your marketing and SEO efforts, product and inventory management, shipping, orders and payments, site security and client management.
phpBB
phpBB (PHP Bulletin Board) is one of the most widely used open source online discussion board/forum systems on the web. phpBB is designed to be small, quick and efficient while still offering the same standard features found in some of the larger commercial discussion forum applications.
Take complete control of your phpBB installation by using one of the many free, or premium, themes available or take it a step further by choosing and installing some of the modifications available to add further functionality to the base software. phpBB is also multilingual with translations and support for more than 40 languages due to the work of a dedicated team of translators.
Drupal
Drupal is a large open source content management framework that currently powers thousands of websites around the world. Initially released as a content management system in 2001, Drupal has come a long way from it’s initial form as a message board in 1990
Drupal provides similar features to those found in other content management frameworks, making it a great way to publish and share content on your website. Using the powerful Drupal administration dashboard you can take complete control over how your website looks and functions by adjusting the default settings or installing a range of pre-made themes and modules.
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is an open source wiki package that can be used to build your own wiki website, just like Wikipedia. MediaWiki was originally created to serve as a management system for the Wikipedia project in 2002 before being released for free to the general public.
MediaWiki can be customised to suit the needs of your website or knowledge base via 2 methods, adjusting the 700+ configuration settings or installing one or more of the 1800+ extensions. MediaWiki is also available in more than 300 languages which allows you to run it on your own website with support for each language.
Magento
Magento is a popular e-commerce solution that allows you to build an online store using either the free community version or a commercial version with additional features and professional support. For the majority of users the community version will suffice due to it’s huge range of features functional settings.
Magento has everything you would expect in an e-commerce package such as product management, SEO settings, invoicing and payments, shipping configuration and customer management. As with most online applications, Magento also offers the ability to customise it, both visually and functionality wise, to your requirements through the use of themes and extensions.
SMF
SMF, Simple Machines Forum, is a highly popular open source discussion board application that allows you to build a large online community. SMF was originally developed as a replacement to a previously popular message board system before receiving great popularity.
SMF boasts a large range of powerful features including those you would expect in an online discussion board such as user management, administrator and moderator permissions, usage statistics, theming support and third party plugin support.
Start Using Softaculous Today
Enhance your website with one of the many free applications available within Softaculous today. Simply login to your web hosting cPanel on all of our shared hosting plans, excluding Personal Basic, and choose the application that best suits your requirements.
