Next up with planning a website I am looking at a few out of the box platforms I use, phpbb, wordpress and oscommerce.

Forums - Basically you cannot go wrong with phpbb, its forums, ready to go, you probably don’t even need the ‘forums for dummies’ book. Basic Mysql and php knowledge will see it installed and configured within an hour, and there is a huge array of crazy modifications people have done, turning your forum from generic to specialist.

Phpbb covers the code, largely - even if only to use as a test base. I would recommend including a phpbb forum in 60% of start up website’s. Because depending on the site you will either get a good hit from the forums, with slow but steady inclusion of appropriate users or just spam. Car clubs, niche products that require substancial support - great examples of phpbb start ups, generic, huge or anonymous websites are probably better without it. Phpbb allows borderline sites to test out the idea of a forum easily, if it isnt working within a month - cut it out. One thing to mention with Phpbb is that things like verification images can help cut down on spam, but it does provide another avenue for spammers - Use as many measures as possible to stop repeating spammers- note thier ip’s and use htaccess to block them!! - Great things to add are themes (millions around) and custom emoticons.

Bloggage - simply put its down to preference, I can personally say Wordpress all the way. I just like it. With the new edition of 2.2 (I think) with tagging support it is hard to beat. I am obviously a bit biased as I am typing this strait into it. Things to note are modifications are made even easier with plugin support, theme editor etc. Again there are so many modifications for wordpress you can use it as almost anything, code is simple and well thought out - so making it do almost anything you want isn’t too complex. Enough Said!!

Selling - I will start with the platform, which depends on a few things. Credit Card processing should be taken into account before you buy a cart or even choose it. You may think its easy to get set up with a credit card processing account, but it can be a long drawn out process, it can take 5 days for them to ye’or’no you - and a fair few might turn you down unless you have impeccable credit and an established banking history (your business.) This is only usually a problem when starting up a new business. A lot of the time its your own bank who will most easily provide you with this service.

Depending on the bank/service there are an insane variety of shopping cart platforms. If you are using a mainstream UK bank, and intend to do all the shopping cart bit yourself, or you are keeping it simple and only selling a few products or services I would recommend Roman Cart. Its infinitely simple, and thats it downfall - its hosted by them, so you loose some functionality and essentially can only provide a ‘look a like’ shopping cart and processing section. Expect to pay £50 a year for this simple cart service.

If you intend to operate a webshop or to sell 5 to 1000 products I would recommend Oscommerce. For a start its free - which is always nice, secondly its supported by a good community, and as with all other good opensource platforms it has thousands of ‘contributions’ or modifications that help it be what you need it to be. I recently installed a HSBC module created by a member of the community to intergrate HSBC cpi with oscommerce - it was a bit problematic but the community provided great support and in the end its fully working at zero cost bar a few hours work.

I would go to the extent that oscommerce would be a good base even if you want to almost completly modify it. A lot of webshops that are completly unrecognizable as oscommerce sites, are - just heavily modified in appearance.

Open source is definatly the way to go in my opinion though - for start up business’s you cant knock free, well supported opportunity.