Zing Blog by ZingWiz

My favorite Web-related open source software packages:

1. Wordpress – easy to install, design, expand blogging platform. Everybody uses it…come on, give it a shot, you know you’ll like it.
2. Magento – A new eCommerce platfomr. A little confusing, but man, they’re are building everything you need into this puppy, and it looks great (but could use more templates)! Currently in version 1.1, but very deep. I see great things on the horizon.
3. Drupal/Joomla – both very nice Content Management Systems for creating dynamic sites. Like Wordpress, but on steroids. Both have their pluses and minuses. Drupal seems more flexible, with a more “professional” community, but Joomla has more templates and a larger community.
4. Notepad++ – I love this little text editor.
5. WinMerge – This is a file comparison tool that isn’t just for the web. I don’t use it that often, but when I do, it saves me a lot of hasstle – mainly when I’m upgrading particular eCommerce websites from one version of software to another. It allows you to compare two files, and shows you what’s differernt and what’s the same so I don’t end up overwriting the custom coding I spent hours on previously.
6. FireFox – Superior Web Browser for two reasons 1) it is more standards compliant than IE5,6,7 and 2) because of the nice web geek plugins out there like FireBug,  Web Developer Toolbar, SeoBook.com’s SEO plugin, IE Tab (eliminates need for IE!), Screengrab (for the portfolio sots), and a ton more. -  3.0 was just released like 2 weeks ago (at the time of this posting)
7. lipsum.com – This isn’t exactly open source I guess, but I thought I’d include it. I pretty much always go here to get filler text for design projects. I’ve been to a few other sites that may be better (maybe), but this one is always the one I always remember, and it’s got a text generator where you can specify how much text you want.

What are your favorites?

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