Reviews
Sep
05
Top 5 Free PHP Forums
Today, we are going to take a look at some free PHP forums that are ideal for your web site or community on the internet. Alot of times, when you are first starting out on the internet, it is hard to justify buying an expensive forum solution for your site. Below are some of the free PHP forums that we have used over the years and have positive results from.
phpBB
phpBB is a free flat-forum bulletin board software solution that can be used to stay in touch with a group of people or can power your entire website. With an extensive database of user-created modifications and styles database containing hundreds of style and image packages to customise your board, you can create a very unique forum in minutes. More Info & Features
Phorum
Started in 1998, Phorum was the original PHP and MySQL based Open Source forum software. Phorum’s developers pride themselves on creating message board software that is designed to meet different needs of different web sites while not sacrificing performance or features. More Info & Features
FluxBB
FluxBB is designed as a lighter, faster alternative to some of the traditional feature heavy forum applications. It is easy to use and has a proven track record of stability and security making it an ideal choice of forum for your website. More Info & Features
Vanilla Forums
Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone can download and use the Vanilla forum package with no limitations for free! More Info & Features
PunBB
PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages. More Info & Features
Aug
22
Top 10 Free Web Hosts
Before I was able to afford my own dedicated server, I was forced to test out many free web hosting services. There are many good ones and many more bad ones. This list, in my opinion includes the best places to host your website for free.
All of the following have been selected based on the host offering PHP / MySQL and do NOT force ADS.
000webhost.com
000webhost.com ($0.00 webhost), is an industry leader in providing top class free web hosting services without advertising! There are no hidden costs, no adverts, and no restrictive terms. Lighting fast speeds, maximum reliability and fanatical user support are just a few of the features you’ll receive with our service. More Info & Features
Batcave.net
Move your website from your old host to us and experience our reliable hosting for Free! We offer free no forced ads web hosting that’s better than most paid hosts. More Info & Features
1gb.me
1gb.me (pronounced “1 gigabyte me”) allows you to make your own free website. Our system has been engineered to provide fast page responses to your scripts and webpages. We provide an array of web site tools for you to start your own online presence. So go ahead and create your own 1gb free hosting account and get up and running in minutes! More Info & Features
Byet Internet
For any web site from a small business brochure, pictures of a tropical holiday, to powerful dynamic websites for a gaming clan etc, Byet Internet has the right services for you and at the right price… $0.00! Byet gives you the choice of your sub domain. You can stick with yoursite.byethost.com, or you can pick from another 7 great names we have available. With MySQL, PHP, FTP, VistaPanel (our specially designed control panel) and other features, you can host heaps of scripts with no worries. Adding your own domain registered at any domain registrar is just a few clicks and is hosted on your free Byet account! More Info & Features
FreeHostia – Chocolate
Need a free bite? The Chocolate free web hosting flavor offered by Freehostia allows you to easily create a professional looking site for FREE. Try our Elefante Installer and install Joomla, WordPress, phpBB and many more free PHP scripts with just one click. More Info & Features
AwardSpace
Quality free web host that offers 250mb storage, 5gb data transfer, 1 top-level domain and 3 subdomains, full dns management, webmail, MySQL 5 database, PHP 5, traffic meter stats, and firewalll protection. Web hosting accounts are provided with web based Control Panel where to easily setup your web site and later on manage it. More Info & Features
TopBox Hosting
There are no hidden fees, no deposit or credit card required. Signing up for a free web hosting account is fast and easy. There are only several steps in our registration process. The best thing about our services is that a free web hosting account does not expire. You can use our services for a lifetime if that is what you desire. Over a long period of time, our free service maintains a high level of service compared to other hosting companies. Our free service can compete quite easily with other free and paid web hosting services. More Info & Features
BonzaHost
We currently offer a very popular KickStart FREE plan great for personal or small business websites who need PHP, MySQL, POP3, SMTP, FTP support & NO FORCED ADS! Our hosting comes with a 99% uptime guarantee, our servers are powerful, stable and utilize 1 Gbps internet connections. Not only will your website be one of the fastest on the internet, but it will also remain the most reliable! More Info & Features
Penny Hosts
We offer a complete free solution with everything you need to run your own website. Powerful free hosting plan has PHP 5 and MySQL support. Free sub-domain, FTP access. The Automatic Script Installer (Like Fantastico) is included with every free hosting plan. You can install many popular scripts such as PHPbb2 & PHPbb3, WordPress, Zen-Cart, osCommerce, MyBB, UseBB, MyLittle Forum, 4images, Coppermine, SMF, Joomla, e107, XOOPS, PHP Wind, CuteNews, Mambo, WikiWig and many more! More Info & Features
Oni.cc
We have optimized and upgraded our free hosting network again to ensure we stay top of the charts! New MySQL servers have been installed making the free hosting cluster faster with even more capacity. We used a powerful cluster of web servers that are all interconnected to act as one giant super computer. This technology is years ahead of other hosting providers. More Info & Features
Conclusion
As with any new business or project, minimizing costs in the beginning is a major concern. Sometimes you just want to get that site up and running so it can start generating traffic and link popularity before growing into a monetary venture. Hopefully, the above free web hosts will help you launch your next web site. If you feel we have missed some great free web host providers that feature PHP / MySQL and NO ADS, please comment below… Enjoy!
Aug
22
The 10 Most Useful WordPress Plugins
With the popularity of WordPress, there is no shortage of useful plugins to make your blog more exciting and interactive. For those new to the WordPress platform choosing the right plugin can be a daunting task. Many plugins are poorly written or can cause your blog to function improperly. In this list I will share what I think are the 10 most useful WordPress plugins for your blog to thrive on the internet. The list I have compiled below are solid Free WordPress plugins that are essential to just about every single WordPress blog that you will ever need.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. More Info & Features
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. More Info & Features
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics for WordPress is the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Of course, you could just copy the tracking code into your theme and be done with it, but then you’d miss a whole lot of features that this plugin has to offer you. All the extra data this plugin can add to your tracking is what makes Google Analytics for WordPress into the most powerful tracking tool you’ve ever seen. More Info & Features
Fast Secure Contact Form
This plugin allows a webmaster to easily create and add contact forms to WordPress. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin. An administration panel is present, where the webmaster can create and preview unlimited forms. More Info & Features
Redirection
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation. More Info & Features
Broken Link Checker
This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional). Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects. Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email. Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional). Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional). More Info & Features
All in One SEO Pack
Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Support for Custom Post Types, Advanced Canonical URLs, Fine tune Page Navigational Links, Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality, ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites, Nonce Security, Support for CMS-style WordPress installations, and tons more features… More Info & Features
FeedWordPress
FeedWordPress is an open-source Atom/RSS aggregator for the WordPress blog publishing platform. You set up feeds that you choose, and FeedWordPress syndicates posts from those sources into your WordPress posts table, where they can be displayed by your WordPress templates like any other post — but with additional meta-data, so that your templates can properly attribute the post to the source it came from. More Info & Features
NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. Before I started writing the plugin I studied all the existing image and gallery plugins for WordPress. Some of them are really good and well designed, but the gap I filled was a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries. More Info & Features
WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by the legacy caching engine. More Info & Features
Conclusion
I hope you will find these WordPress plugins listed in this post useful to your next blog / project. If you have any other essential plugins that you use in your everyday blogging life, please feel free to share them by leaving a comment below… Enjoy!
