Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Get the open-source PHP CAPTCHA script “Secureimage” at PHPcaptcha.org. Generate complex images and CAPTCHA codes with a script that can be easily added into existing forms on your website to provide protection from spam bots. All you need to run it is PHP and GD support within PHP. The Securimage script generates the CAPTCHA images and validates the typed code. Audible codes can be streamed to the browser with Flash for the vision impaired. It requires no configuration after downloading. PHP 4 and PHP 5 versions available for download.

If you need a simple open source Q&A solution for your website, give Question2Answer a try. This is a dedicated question and answer solution and not just a simplified forum. It features a five minute install, easy CSS themes, search engine, e-mail notifications, voting, comments and follow-up questions, categories and tags and is scalable to millions of posts. This question and answer software is licensed under GNU GPL. According to the site the Q&A platform has been installed over 1000 times.

For a fully customizable web chat software try BlueImp’s open source AJAX Chat which is implemented in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL. AJAX Chat features:

multiple channels, private messaging and channels, invitation system, banning offending users, online users, emoticons, optional Flash sound support, clickable hyperlinks, enable/ disable guest users, possibility to define opening hours for the chat, IRC style commands, flood control, automatic adjustment of displayed time to local client timezone, easy layout customization through stylesheets (CSS) and template system, persistent client-side settings, message character counter, sample phpBB2, phpBB3, MyBB, PunBB, SMF, vBulletin integration provided, realtime monitoring and logs viewer, support for unicode (UTF-8) and non-unicode content types, bandwidth saving update calls (only updated data is sent), well commented Source Code and much more.

Developed with Security as integral part, AJAX Chat is built to prevent Code injections, SQL injections, Cross-site scripting (XSS), Session stealing and other attacks.

AJAX Chat is released free of charge under the GNU Affero General Public License.

Flash and ActionScript 3.0 user interface components can take lots of time to create, so why not use some ready-made, open source starter components, like the ones on MinimalComps.com ? The components on this site are lightweight, but extremely small and easy to use. In fact, the site is created purely with Minimal Components and comes in at about 60kb for the whole site! Choose from sliders, calendars, bar charts, numeric steppers, draggable windows, VSliders, HSliders, text areas, knobs and more. You can find more info on MinimalComps on Keith Peters’ blog at Bit-101.com.

If you need a simple yet versatile FTP program, give Cyberducka try. This Open Source FTP program also handles FTP/TLS (FTP secured over SSL/TLS), SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer), WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning), Amazon S3, Google Storage, Google Docs, Windows Azure and Rackspace Cloud Files. Works with open cloud software from Eucalyptus and OpenStack. You can basically upload, download and synchronize anything from any server.

You can edit any text or binary file on the server in your preferred application, configure CloudFront and Rackspace to distribute your files, browse your Amazon S3 account like your hard disk, convert uploads to Google Docs format and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for image uploads. It also has bookmarking capabilities, advanced SSH features and supports Growl and Mac’s Keychain.

If you’re trying to get an auction site up and running quickly, give Webid a try. It is still in beta stages, but is already a popular open-source auction solutions, written in PHP and customizable. Webid features an administration panel, quick install and setup, different themes and easy integration with PayPal and Authorize.Net.

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.