Intro, Part 13: The Web Apps We Use
Here’s a run down of the web application software we are using or planning to use for the Well Designed URLs Initiative:
- Blog
- At “blog.” is running WordPress using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. We have direct experience with WordPress, Typepad, dasBlog, and Community Server, and among these options WordPress is definitely the best blog software for the URL Aficionado.
- Wiki
- At “wiki.” runs Mediawiki, also on using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and is the same software used by as Wikipedia. Although setting up clean URLs can be a real pain on Mediawiki if you are not a regular expressions wizard, we think Mediawiki is the most mature wiki software, and nobody can debate that it has the best known user-interface.
- Forums
- To be at “forums.” will almost certainly run on vBulletin which also runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Even though vBulletin isn’t open-source and costs US$85/year to lease[1], as users we have used practically every forum in existence and in our opinion nothing comes close to the usability and performance of vBulletin. We only wish that the vendor of vBulletin could envision a business model leveraging open-source so those who for whatever reason won’t use commercial software would be able to consider vBulletin; we think that would make the forum world a nicer place. Well that, and changing their default template; the visual layout as shipped is horrible!
- CMS
- To be at “www.“; we’ll probably use Drupal, Django, or similar when we get to installing and configuring it. In other words, when we really need the features of a CMS, we’ll add one. ;-)
The all the web applications we mentioned are great, and we can highly recommend them to almost anyone. The downside of using them though is being separate apps they are not well integrated. But, we’ll see what we can do about that in the future. Hopefully someone will see what a huge need and certain demand for integrating open-source web apps based on MySQL and they will solve this problem just as the WSGI team seems to be solving a similar problem in the Python web app world.
- Or you can purchase vBulletin for US$160 with one year of updates.