Website development and design have been widely affected by the growing changes in technology. In the last decade, web hosting has also seen a shift from the traditional form of hosting to cloud based hosting. The technologies are bringing more reliability, speed and cost effectiveness in the business of web development and maintenance. Virtually every medium-sized business and big companies have websites. This has created a huge demand for website programming and designing. It has also created many ways of increasing the speed at which these websites are built. This has mainly been attributed to the categories that have been given to websites such as blog websites, e-commerce websites and even payment processing websites. The most commonly used open-source methods of developing and designing websites include the following.
CMS
CMSs have changed the traditional way of building websites from scratch. Basically, a CMS is a content management system that allows and ensures ease of data handling within the site. A CMS is software mostly open-source software that has already been developed to run various forms of web applications. Website programming knowledge is not necessary with CMS as one can easily build his or her own website within a couple of hours by just using drag and drop options. WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are the commonly used blogging CMS platforms today.
Shopping Carts
Since content is not the only item powering the internet, e-commerce platforms are also popular and they are not left out. Shopping cart platforms such as Magento, Shopify, Prestashop and more help businesses looking to showcase their products online do it with ease. These platforms also come embedded with the latest technologies of payment gateways to ensure that your receive money from multiple currencies and geographical locations.
Forums
Forums are important for our day to day communications and forums help us communicate with communities that understand us. Unlike social networks, forums are niche oriented and, therefore, involve a lot of discussions on their boards. The introduction of special forum scripts / open-source software such as phpBB, XenForo, vBullletin and more has seen an increase in forum websites reducing the need for programming specialists.
Social Networks
Although there are only a few social networks with hundreds of millions of users, social networks have become a huge drive of the internet. This has largely been attributed to niche-oriented social networks and dating sites. Website programming is no longer required to run a community of a few million members. With well maintained and regularly updated social networking scripts, it is now possible, much easier and less time-consuming to come up with a competitive social network or a dating site. The most popular scripts for social networks include elgg, oxwall, dolphin and more.
Why is Open-Source software becoming popular to Programming?
Although most of the open-source or premium scripts may not fully serve all your website features, they come with a wide range of benefits. One of the most vital benefits is scalability. Since the software are written by advanced and experienced professionals, they are more scalable and in most cases have a small footprint. The open-source software also provides efficiency as it requires less time and money to set up a website. They also provide an easy to use backend for the website administrators.