cPanel Fantastico - Features and Benefits
Fantastico is a 3rd-party cPanel add-on and can be purchased and added to the standard cPanel interface. Fantastico allows you to quickly install a variety of open-source scripts. By selecting a script and providing some basic information for each, you can install a script within minutes. Fantastico is designed so that the script you install is always the newest available.
Below is some of the scripts available for installation in Fantastico:
Blogs
- b2Evolution: A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages and search engines friendly URLs.
- Nucleus: A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts, future posts and bookmarklets.
- WordPress: A personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics and featuring cross-blog tool, password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors and bookmarklets.
Content Management
- Drupal: An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging and news aggregator.
- Mambo: A professional level yet easy to use CMS featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, newsfeeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date based content, 20 languages, modules and components.
- php-Nuke: One of the most popular community-based portals with a big choice of languages and modules.
- SiteFrame: A straightforward CMS designed for rapid deployment of community-based websites. Nice-looking templates, oriented toward document-sharing, clean interface.
Customer Relationships
- Crafty Syntax: A Live Help chat system featuring monitor your visitors, proactively open a chat session, multiple chat sessions, referrer tracking, page view tracking, multiple operators, canned responses/images/URLs, multiple departments each with different icons, leave a message.
- Help Center Live: Very powerful all-in-one help center including Live Help, Support Tickets and FAQ. Features include unlimited operators/departments, monitor visitors, initiate chat, collect visitor's information, track visitor's footprint, auto save chat transcripts, canned messages, leave a message, auto-assign tickets to operators, unlimited FAQ topics.
- osTicket: Featuring email piping, pop3 login, unlimited email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, avoid autoresponder loops, limit maximum tickets user can have opened, accept attachments and limit size, pager alerts for admin.
- Support Logic: A support tickets system featuring multiple email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, canned responses, HTML tags support, email limit on a per user/day basis, attachments.
Discussion Boards
- Invision Board: A widely-popular open-source bulletin-board package, works well, simple user interface and admin panel, clean look, scales well, and can be customized.
- SMF: Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources.
E-Commerce
- CubeCart: An easy to use yet powerful shopping cart featuring unlimited categories and products, multiple payment gateways, downloadable products. The design is very easy to modify.
- OS Commerce: A power-user shopping cart with a big variety of modules and support of almost every payment gateway.
- ZenCart: Zen Cart is a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently.
Image Galleries
- 4Images Gallery: Unlimited categories/subcategories, web-based and FTP images upload, auto-thumbnails, comments, send a picture and rate a picture.
- Coppermine: With categories and albums, thumbnails and intermediate size pics, search feature, new and random pictures, user management and user comments.
- Gallery: Featuring albums within albums, thumbnailing specific picture area, captions, rotate, reorder pictures and album mirroring.
Mailing List
- PHPlist: A powerful mailing list featuring multiple mailing lists and attachments.
Apart from the above scripts, Fantastico has a whole load of other scripts ranging from PHPAcution to WebCalendar.
If your hosting company uses cPanel with Fantastico, you will be able to add attractive features to your website free of charge by installing one or more of the scripts mentioned above. Without Fantastico, it is still possible to add these features but you will have to manually install and configure the scripts yourself. To make life easier for yourself, make sure you choose a hosting company which offers Fantastico.