Open Source

 

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and knowledge management uses to large corporate and political sites. High-traffic Drupal-based websites include ubuntu.com and seobook.com. In October 2009, the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama adopted Drupal for the official Whitehouse.gov website.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts within a flexible and rich permission / privilege system, create and manage menus, RSS-feeds, customize page layout, perform logging, and administer the system. As installed, Drupal provides options to create a classic brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for User-generated content.

Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added to extend Drupal's core capabilities. This is done via installation of plug-in modules (known as contrib modules) created and contributed to the project by open source community members. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework.

 

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of the varied services that Google already offers. Of course, like most of their applications, completely free, there is also a premium version specifically designed for business customers and large multinational organizations.

Google Apps offers effective tools for handling, management and customization utilities for Internet domain names. In other words, Google Apps allows you to manage your domain email (via Gmail), instant messaging between members of your organization or network (Google Talk), online calendar (Google Calendar) Document editing also online (Google Docs) and creation of professional websites (Google Sites).

Google Apps offers three different service plans, focusing specifically on three main types of customers. Likewise, within each plan are given different levels of service:

  • Companies and employees. Standard (free) and Premier (paid).
  • Teachers and Student Centers. Standard (free), Premier (paid) and Education (only for institutions, non-profit student).
  • Organizations and Members. Same plane as the Teacher Edition and Student Center.

 

Wordpress

WordPress is a popular content management system, more oriented blogs. Through this software and interface, users can create their own blogs in a simple and personalized way, can be used for basic content management. It was first released in May 2003 as the successor to b2/cafelog and has become one of the most popular CMS of the blogosphere.

It is powered by PHP and a MySQL data back-end. As of September 2009, Wordpress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide. In 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.