Open source favorites
I should mention that — except where noted — all of these packages are either web-based, or cross-platform.
I use quite a few open source applications in my day-to-day tinkering and freelance gigging. What open-source apps do you use regularly (or not-so-regularly)?
- Firefox
- My vote for Greatest Browser Ever.
- WordPress
- Kick-ass blog publishing software. Also available in a multi-user version.
- OpenOffice.org
- A full-featured office productivity suite that rivals Microsoft Office at 1/400th the price.
- Audacity
- Open source sound recording and editing software with support for MP3, WAV, AIFF, AU and Ogg Vorbis.
- phpCollab
- Web-based project management and tracking software written in PHP.
- MediaWiki
- It’s the PHP-and-database-driven wiki software that powers Wikipedia.
- FreeMind
- Java-based tool helps manage brainstorms.
- FileZilla
- FTP/SFTP client for Windows.
- PuTTY
- Telnet/SSH client for Windows.
- jEdit
- My new favorite text editor can extend into an integrated development environment with the help of some nifty plugins.
- Aptana
- Aptana is a front-end coder’s dream, with auto complete and debugging for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Aptana has also added support for Ruby and PHP in recent months.
- CocoaMySQL
- A desktop-based open source graphical user interface for the MySQL database. Mac OS X only.
- Related: What’s your favorite text editor or IDE?
- Related: Firefox goodies
- Related: Aptana IDE: Is it the text editor you’ve been looking for?
Firefox, OOo, Filezilla, and PuTTY are all essential for sure.
A few more:
CDEX - CD Ripper
CVS - Source Control
Ethereal - Network Protocol Analyzer
Apache + Tomcat / PHP / Mono / JBoss - App server
What’s your thought on Drupal vs Wordpress ?
I like WordPress’s ease of configuration. It’s very easy to get up and running, and very easy to create your own theme. Think of WordPress as a blogging package that can be massaged into a CMS.
Drupal is too big a package for just blogging. It’s very full-featured, and very good for sites with lots of content or that need a workflow. Think of Drupal as a CMS that can be massaged into blogging software. And it’s much, much harder to develop themes for Drupal. I can launch a custom-designed WP site in a weekend. I can’t say that about Drupal.
WP also supports clean URLs. I’m using funky numeric URLs here to preserve my existing URL structure. But with WordPress you can have URLs such as ‘http://domainname.com/this-is-the-post-name’ instead of the ‘http://domainname.com/node/234′ URLs you get with Drupal.
Hmm… Regarding Drupal, I do agree that it has a fair amount of complexity, as it was not designed to _only_ be a blogging publishing engine. It is a quite simply a collaboration tool. If you only want a blogging publishing engine, go get MT or WP. I wouldn’t consider MT or WP to be turn-key collaboration tools. So Drupal vs. WP is like comparing sheep and moose
That said, it is uber powerful and it _does_ handle path aliasing when you use the appropriate modules. Actually, I found an excellent Drupal videocast for newbies. That site is chock full info on all things Drupal.
Heh, FOSS favorites.. There are many,but I’ll only bless you with a few. The last two are Java apps, so they’re really not ‘free’ as in free speech.
Ekiga - SIP phone and much more
Evolution - email client
Gnucash - Personal finance tool
amaroK - Music application rivals iTunes
Beagle - Desktop indexing application
azureus - P2P BitTorrent application
Limewire - P2P Gnutella network application
Thanks AG, I figured there was a module somewhere. But WP does it out of the box.
You can do collaboration to a degree with WP and MT. But I agree that Drupal was designed to be a collaboration tool first, while WP and MT were designed to blogging tools with collaboration features.
It really depends on what your needs are.