Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If it’s time to once again upgrade your latest word processor, spreadsheet or other office software, and you’re reluctant to spend hefty fees to do so, you may want to consider OpenOffice, the free and open office productivity suite. If you’re already using another office software package, OpenOffice will most likely be able to read these files. OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely free of any licence fees. It is released under the LGPL licence which means you may use it for any purpose – domestic, commercial, educational, public administration and install it on as many computers as you like.

If you have large documents on your site (incl. books), and you don’t want to make them available as a separate download, you could have them displayed in a browser instead. FlexPaper is an open source web based document viewer that uses Flash. It is delivered both as a stand alone flash application and as a Flex (SWC) library, so it can be integrated it into your application in different ways. Examples and use of FlexPaper.

The Spamhaus Project tracks the internet’s spam senders and spam services and makes available blocklists (free for low usage) to filter your e-mail. Before you set your e-mail servers to use Spamhouse’s blocklists, be sure to check their usage terms to see if you qualify for free use. If you think your IP might actually be on their blocked list, you can check your IP and get info on how to be removed. For a list of the 10 worst ISPs that knowingly cater to spammers, or do nothing to prevent spam, click here.

Drupal is a great CMS but the number of beautiful and free Drupal themes is limited. 1stWebDesigner has done all the legwork for you and collected 27 of the best designed Drupal themes for you. Looks like all of them originated on the drupal.org website.

If you regularly work with different programming languages, you might like using the free open source Komodo Edit; it supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and Tcl, plus JavaScript, CSS, HTML and template languages like RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django. It features autocomplete and calltips, multi-language file support, syntax coloring and syntax checking, Vi emulation, Emacs key bindings. Additionally, Komodo is available for Linux, Windows, Mac.

Create a forum on your website with free open source software phpBB. According to the site, “phpBB™ has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB™ 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes. With a large and highly customisable set of key features coupled with a standards compliant interface, phpBB™ will grow with, and complement your website. With millions of installations worldwide, it is no wonder phpBB™ is one of the most popular ways to create and support a community.”

Can your site handle a large increase in traffic? Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which are useful for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning.

Batch processing of images and manually renaming Exifs (Exchangeable Image File format is an image file format used by digital cameras) is a very time consuming task. Phatch is a free tool for processing batches of images and renaming Exifs. It’s open source and works on Linux, Mac Os X and Windows for all popular image formats. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually.

If you’d like to run your own personal URL shortener script, try BrainCray’s free PHP URL shortener script. Some of the proclaimed URL shortener script’s features are:

- Can shorten over 42 billion unique URLs in 6 or less characters (it can do more than 12,000,000 in only 4!)
- Includes an API so you can create your own short URLs on the fly
- Only uses alphanumeric characters so all browsers can interpret the URL
- Secure: several data filters in place to prevent SQL injection hacks
- Option to check if the URL is real (doesn’t respond with a 404) before shortening
- Option to change the characters allowed in a shortened url

There are many useful open source applications out there and Help Center Live’s Live Chat application is one of them. “Help Center Live is an open-source, community driven live chat & support system. You may easily provide live support on your website just like large companies do with very little work. With Help Center Live, you can provide a real-time, live support or sales person experience.”