Products we use

Many development businesses will point you in the direction of commercial software with costs ranging from $150 to much more. In our opinion, there is no advantage in paying for these products as a small business owner. The open source software that is freely available via a general public licence (GPL)  is at least as good as most products on the market, and often offers better support.

For content management, we use Website Baker, an open source, PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) designed with one goal in mind: to enable its users to produce a website with ease.

For online shops, we use CubeCart. In the case of shopping carts, unlike CMSes, it is difficult to find a well supported free product. CubeCart is a popular shopping cart which can be used for free provided their copyright is acknowledged, or you can choose to pay around AU$100 to register and remove the acknowledgement. Another shopping cart which we work with is osCommerce. osCommerce is a popular open source product, and is free to use.

Each of these products have enthusiastic and active user communities, which can be accessed through online forums for support.

We encourage our customers to make donations to open source products used when their websites go live. Donations encourage the developers of open source software and show our appreciation.

Links to further information about Website Baker

• Website Baker home page - features list and basic documentation
• User community forums - ask questions about Website Baker, get a feel for the user and developer community, see sample completed sites in the "Website Showcase"
• OpenSourceCMS demo page - OpenSourceCMS runs a site that allows you to try out lots of different CMSes. There are two links here, one to the "front page" (this is the page that everyone sees), and one to the "admin page" (this is the page that you update the site from). If you choose to have a go, please bear in mind that this is an out-of-the-box installation. The look and feel of your "front page" will differ quite a bit from this, however the "admin page" will essentially be the same.

Links to further information about shopping carts

• CubeCart home page - features list, demo sites and documentation
• osCommerce home page - features list, demo sites and documentation