What Is Fantastico And Why Would You Need It?

If you have been shopping around for a web host, you’ve probably seen Fantastico Deluxe featured by some providers. If you’ve been wondering what is Fantastico, this article is for you.

Fantastico Deluxe is a script installer. It automates the installation of popular web applications like a Wordpress blog or a phpBB forum. Fantastico will run only on cPanel servers running FreeBSD or Linux.

Unless you have you have your own cPanel / WHM licence, chances are you will not install Fantastico yourself: you have to find a web host who provide it with their hosting plans.

Fantastico Deluxe In Action

I figured that I’d make a little video to show you how fast you can setup a blog, a forum and a store. The video ticks in at only 3:48!

All this is currently hosted on my HostGator.com account.

And by the way if you’d like to start your own blog, here are the Wordpress plugins I use along with the nice SEO theme from CourtneyTuttle.com:

• Add Meta Tags : allows you to add custom meta tags to your posts.
• Akismet (update) : an antispam plugin for Wordpress.
• Boakes Most Wanted : display your most popular posts.
• Custom Query String Reloaded : allows you to specify how many posts will appear in different sections of your site (home, archive, category, etc).
• FeedBurner Feedsmith : redirect your Wordpress feeds to your FeedBurner feed so you can track subscribers.
• Full Text Feed : allows you to display the partial content of your posts on the home page while delivering a full text feed.
• Get Recent Comments : self-explanatory…
• Google XML Sitemaps : this plugin generates a sitemap.xml file for your website and notifies Google, Yahoo and Live Search about updates to your blog.
• Kimili Flash Embed : display Flash animations in your posts.
• Popularity Contest : rank your posts based on your readers’ behavior on your blog.
• Show Top Commentators : self-explanatory…
• Show Top Commentators : reward your most active readers by posting their name and link to their site when they comment your posts.
• Social Bookmarks : display links to some of the most popular social bookmarking sites at the end of your posts.
• TinyMCE Advanced : advanced features for Wordpress’ visual editor.
• Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure : a SEO plugin that prevents search engine from indexing duplicate content from your blog.
• wp-cache : Fast cache module for Wordpress.

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