9 Free, Open Source, and Phenomenal Platforms You May Not Know Yet
ECommerce
Magento:
Open Source eCommerce Evolved. Although still in BETA, Magento is feature rich, flexible, and has modular architecture and rich functionality. This is the complete ecommerce solution, knockin' everyone out of the way… forcefully. Tons of features are included with the sexy beast.
Customer Features:
* Search Engine Optimization (SEO) * Customer Communication * Ship to Multiple Addresses * Search * Product Comparison * Layered Navigation * Product Tagging * Product Reviews * Wishlist * Checkout * Shopping Cart * Customer Accounts
Admin Panel:
* Marketing Features * Reports * Defining Tax Rules * Products and Catalog * Content Management System (CMS) * Customer Groups * Import/Export * Permissions (ACL)
General Features include the flexibility of multiple currencies, languages, payment and shipping methods and more.
Magento Main Site | Store Demo
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Social Community
Dolphin:
Excellent Social Network or Dating Community Software. The features are endless, all in which are customizable. Utilize all features or utilize just a few, it's really up to you. You can easily turn this community into a paid membership - integrating with just about every payment processor, or allow users to join for free.
Here's a quick list of just a few features this crazy porpoise has…
- User Blogs
- User Videos
- User Music Groups
- Classifieds
- Events/Calendars
- Polls
- Forums
- Articles/Content Management
- Boards
- Live Chat
- Rating System
- Payment System
- Hot or Not
Newsletter … and the list goes on and on. Dolphin Smart Community Builder is totally free. But you'll have to keep the branding in place and visible, or pay $39/year or $99 flat out. Licensed under Creative Commons.
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Social Bookmarking
Scuttle:
Web-based social bookmarking system. Allows multiple users to store, upload, share and tag their favorite links online. Much like del.ici.ous. Get it at Sourceforge.net
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Digg - Like
Pligg:
Killer Digg-Like knockoff. Need I say more? Self explanatory, right? Pligg allows complete control of voting-who, what, when, where, and how. Feature Rich with tons of cool plugins. Pligg is easy to install and easy to use, for the admin and the user. Customizing or developing your template, on the other hand, can get a bit messy. There's some pretty great sites out there using Pligg…
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Forums
Vanilla
A Rich User Experience Slick Administration Capabilities Extend the functionality of your forum with limitless Add-ons. Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Excellent Forum platform… Slick and full of features/functionality.
Vanilla is free and open-source and makes it easy for developers to draw up their ideas and integrate as plugins. Highly recommend checkin' this one out!
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Emulation
BitNami
Open Source Simplified. Not really a web-app, but this is one damn helpful set of tools. Bitnami bundles several killer open source apps into a ready-made, self installing, Design and develop your Joomla! (or other) site locally - on your computer, not needing the internet to browse or develop your site. I personally love these tools… One thing to keep in mind… after installing, be sure that processes aren't running on reboot… you'll unexpectedly have a slower than normal machine. Features:
- Easy to install In just a few clicks, you can have your favorite open source applications up and running.
- Multiplatform Bitnami Stacks are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
- Integrated By the time you click 'finish', the software will be integrated, configured and ready to go.
- Independent Bitnami Stacks won't interfere with any software already installed on your system.
- Run Natively The stacks install directly on your system - no virtual machine required.
- Open Source All Bitnami Stacks are free to download and use under the terms of the Apache License 2.0
Platforms you can get from Bitnami:
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Wiki
MindTouch
MindTouch Deki Wiki is a free open source wiki and application platform for communities and enterprises. Deki Wiki is an easy to use and sophisticated wiki for authoring, aggregating, organizing, and sharing content. Deki Wiki is also a platform for creating collaborative applications, or adding wiki capabilities to existing applications. I haven't had the opportunity to pick the brain of mindtouch, but I've heard great things… check it out, let me know what you think.
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Invoicing
Bamboo Invoice
Oh so simple, yet so complicated. Not really… this platform is great for handling your invoicing. It does just as you'd think… it's light, intuitive, "ajaxy," and more… Not to mention the guy behind this, Derek Allard, seems like a great developer and a great guy. If you just a need a simple, yet feature rich way to collect your millions, this is by far the best choice. See for yourself… or just trust me.
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Blog
Roller
Roller is the open source Java blog server that drives blogs.sun.com, IBM Developer Works blogs and numerous other sites. Roller supports all of the latest-and-greatest weblogging features such as group blogging, RSS and Atom newsfeeds, rich-text editing, customizable page templates, comments, trackbacks, referrers, blogroll management and provides Atom Publishing Protocol and XML-RPC interfaces for blogging clients. Need I say more? This bulldozer of a blog is one bad-ass biatch. I haven't had much time or opportunity to use it, so if you have - or if you intend on installing and using, let me know how it goes.
Tags: opensource, free, magento, pligg, roller, vanilla, forums, ecommerce, social bookmarking, social network, bitnami, wiki, invoicing, cms, content management, downloads
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Comments
Thanks for mentioning MindTouch Jason. Feel free to email or call me directly and I’ll tell you all about Deki Wiki.
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[…] listed 9 free, open source and phenomenal platforms that you might not know of, in this post at OpenJason. This is from where I came to know about Vanilla, a free forum software loaded with the goodness of […]
Thanks for letting this cool information out. I am going to try Vanilla right away and see if I can integrate it with my blog. I’ll share my experience with you after spending sometime with it.