New Website

mpdunnred

I am looking to build a website in the coming months and I would like to have a crack at it myself. Does anyone know of an open source website Package that I could use build it?

Thanks

NeverSayDie

Well, websites are generally built from XHTML and CSS, with some Javascript for more active client-side stuff, there's not really any "package" as such. AFAIK most folks who design websites do the code work in decent text editors - NotePad++ for instance - as opposed to any particular package or IDE. Don't know of any decent FOSS web design tools off the top of my head, Dreamweaver is a popular closed-source commercial one.

If you need to do heavier Javascript work on the client, using one of the modern libraries like JQuery would be a very good idea.

If the website needs to act as a UI to a custom-built backend, then the backend part does open into a lot more implementation options. PHP using a framework like Zend, or Ruby using the Rails framework would be two popular FOSS options.

If there's no need for custom-built code though, a CMS of some sort may well suffice, WordPress would be one of the popular ones for straightforward systems, though there are many more.

mpdunnred

Thanks for that I will check out your reccommendations

Evil Phil

Some of the more popular content management systems (CMS):

http://www.wordpress.org/
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
http://www.joomla.org/
http://www.drupal.org/

However, as NeverSayDie has already suggested if you're going to do it yourself you'll need to know something about HTML/xHTML, CSS and probably a bit of Javascript and perhaps php too. If you're on windows I can recommend editplus for that.

willows

If its going to be primarily selling then choose and ecommerce application like oscommerce, zencart, or magento.

if its CMS then on of the ones mentioned above.

Alot of people make the mistake of wanting the look feel of a CMS and then apply an ecommerce plugin to it, when their aim is selling on line.

If you do this you grow out of your site fast and end off going back and restarting.

So pick the application that applies to the most important part of your site.

Hope this helps

shaneod

There is an awful lot to know when developing a site, I would be very wary of doing it yourself to be honest.

Evil Phil

I'm moving this over to the Design forum where is where these threads really belong.

techguy

shaneod wrote: »

There is an awful lot to know when developing a site, I would be very wary of doing it yourself to be honest.

I agree, but.. It depends on the site to be honest and what you are looking to do..

These days there are really two main parts to a website. Frontend (xhtml,css,javascript) and backend (PHP,MySQL,Apache).

OP, what kind of experience do you have with said technologies?

Excuse me if i'm wrong but it sounds like you have very little. If thats the case then you need to start by getting a feel for HTML. Head on over to www.w3schools.com and start reading some of the tutorials.

Once you get into a bit of HTML and CSS you could design a page. Then go and use a CMS (cms made simple) to manage it all. Thats at a much later stage..

HTH