Overview of recommended scripts
This article is a stub that is being continuously expanded upon. Please check back frequently for the most up-to-date listing of recommended scripts and applications, along with forthcoming descriptions and installation instructions for all mentioned software packages!
Shopping carts and e-commerce
For any business larger than a few employees, email is a poor way of handling orders. Tracking what orders have come in, providing shipping quotes to potential buyers, processing payments, and so forth can consume a lot of time. The Internet has put your business online; shouldn't it automate it, too? Shopping cart or e-commerce scripts can integrate searchable, easily-maintainable categorized product listings, real-time shipping quotes, and on-the-spot payment processing without you needing to do a thing but put the order in a box and ship it. All the power is at your users' fingertips, so you can spend your time running a business instead of fulfilling orders.
Zen Cart
osCommerce
Blogging
Blogging software makes it easy to keep an interactive site journal where users can read your entries, post comments, and automatically receive RSS feeds notifying them when you have updated with a new post.
WordPress
Image galleries
Coppermine
Gallery
Bulletin boards and forums
PunBB
punBB is a lightweight, fast, and secure forum package. While it lacks many features of bulkier forums, such as private messages, thread subscriptions and polls, it is extremely fast, and very capable of handling many users simultaneously with little difficulty.
Simple Machines Forum
Simple Machines is the PHP-based rewrite of the popular old YaBB SE forum. It features an active and healthy mod and skin community, and includes many features that PunBB does not. It is, however, much slower than PunBB.
phpBB
Content management systems
Content management systems are complex pieces of software designed to integrate many common features of a website, and make it easy-to-update and maintainable, often integrating article publishing, categorization and searching, user interaction, photo galleries, categorized download areas, and other systems into a single application. Many even come with a large selection of ready-to-use themes and templates, so you can begin to focus on your website's content, instead of how to present an appealing layout.
Drupal
Joomla!
Wiki software
Wikis are collaborative community-driven web pages that are highly interconnected, and usually allow users to easily edit what others have written. They often use a simplified markup for writing and formatting articles that differs substantially from HTML. Wikis rely on a great deal of automation to enhance workflow; when linking to another article, users typically do not need to know the full URL to the article, only its name. Likewise, creating headings may automatically generate a linked table of contents at the beginning of the page.
They are ideal for dynamic and quickly-changing information, such as breaking news, or articles such as software documentation that benefit greatly from individual users being able to make simple changes and update information themselves rather than having to contact a maintainer of a page and asking them to do it instead. Most Wikis store multiple revisions of a page to roll back changes in case of vandalism. Many Wikis are also protected, allowing only authorized users to create, edit, or delete pages.
Prominent examples of web sites based on Wiki engines are Wikipedia and The TV IV.