JibberBook harnesses the spam protecting power of Akismet. A great customization feature is the ability to choose to store records in MySQL database or using XML. Admins can delete, view, or mark as spam comments left by site visitors. It also truly showcases the simple but noticeable effects of Mootools, which adds a great deal to the user interface and overall user experience.

Though guestbooks are an early web practice and perhaps a borderline Web 1.0 feature, they are still a useful and much saught after web application. And the fact that JibberBook is open source, simple and extremely easy to use, it is sure to be the guestbook application of choice for developers.

On another note, you’ve got to love a company whos entire privacy policy can fit on one line.

At the end of the day, File Savr is a great alternative to other file sharing websites that require signup or email confirmation.

Just stumbled upon this special deal on the website. You get a free, lifetime membership (250GB) to File Savr if you subscribe before September 15th. Enjoy!

You can preview images on the fly, as well as add files to your “cart” and download the whole lot as a ZIP. Uploading is just as easy. Upload a bunch via the ajax loader into any specified folder and you’re all set.

I have found Relay particularly useful when I am unable to connect to my server via FTP to due to firewall regulations. Lose the default CPanel file manager and replace it with the sleek and simple Relay.

While remaining fairly lightweight (1027K unpacked) FrogCMS sacrifices no features. Simple user management and permissions, file management, and a great drag and drop hierarchy organization structure. Completely customizable themes, create your own “snippets” and insert into any page easily. Create separate themes to be used with one page over another. The administration interface flaunts it’s bare bones simplicity to allow you to make any changes with a few clicks.

FrogCMS is a great alternative to feature-bloated content management system, and a must for any web developer looking for the next best simple CMS to work with.

Administrators can create sticky posts, locked posts, categories, and all the things you would expect from a web forum. Users can create and reply to topics as well as subscribe via RSS. Default view lets you see all active topics. If you want just a specific category, just click on the category name and you’ll see just the discussions within that category.

When they say that Vanilla is “Fully Extensible”, they’re not kidding. They have a whole barnyard of add-ons including extensions, themes, styles, and languages. Want to integrate with Wordpress? The creators have put together a have a step-by-step guide here.

Vanilla is a great open source web forum keen on standards and a gleeming of simplicity.

Choosing to allow/disallow intro text, enable trackbacks/pings, changing title alias, etc are all things that a dedicated student or full-time publisher should know – not your average Joe. CushyCMS was created for developers and designers to allow what sections their client could safely edit on their website. By simply adding class=”cushycms” to any tag in your document, that area then becomes editable by the client.

You tell CushyCMS which users can edit what from within the user management dashboard of your account. If you find yourself using this program for more than three clients, go ahead and upgrade to the pro plan. This allows you to brand CushyCMS to your liking. And for $28.00 a month, you can have a client login that looks like this.

When modifying your template to allow for CushyCMS editing, I recommend creating additional div’s solely to hold the class=”cushycms” so that you don’t have multiple class attributes properties embedded in one tag and thus breaking XHTML validity. use <div class=”class1 cushycms”> to get a xhtml valid results as opposed to having two attributes like <div class=”class1″ class=”cushycms”>.

CushyCMS is a great web app for any freelancer who wants to give their client control over the content but not control over the entire site.

There are a number of add ons that JobberBase has for each job listing. For example, you can see the number of applicants per each job, number of times viewed, refer it to a friend through email, and even subscribe to to future job postings via RSS. On top of all those features, you can easily customize the CSS styles to suit your own color scheme.

Whether you want to emulate another job site or focus on that particular niche market, Jobberbase is a simple yet powerful job posting program to get you online.

Claiming the title “fastest growing eCommerce platform on the market”, and with over 400,000 downloads we believe it too, Magento quickly turned heads.

Magento empowers you to manage unlimited categories and products, multilingual support, 100% customizable theming, one-click upgrades, content management for static pages, integration with every major (and some minor) payment gateways, SSL on front and back end, coupons, search engine friendly URLs, guest or member checkouts, wishlists, product tagging and much much more.

For the designer, Magento has a straightfoward step-by-step tutorial on building your own theme.

With a very impressive demo and very intelligent screenshots, it’s clear that osCommerce is being replaced as the open source solution to eCommerce.

Whether you’re selling products from your local store or attic, or you’re running your own multi-million dollar a year e-business, Magento could be the open source solution you’ve been waiting for.

A few modest features include ability to create static pages, dynamic post entries, commenting, multiple authors, and W3C compliance, and the every-convenient “tagging” feature. You can also have an unlimited number of categories, which can be organized using an unlimited tree-level pattern (Category 1 > Sub Cat > Sub Cat > Sub Cat > etc.) For the full list of mind-blowing features check out this page.

Wordpress is the ultimate blogging tool that can be obtained and maintained by a beginner, to customized and popularized by an expert.

Debatedly one of the most robust content management systems out there, Joomla 1.5! is used for building websites ranging from social networking to corporate, real-estate to e-commerce, and news to blogs. Want to use Joomla! for something else in mind? Chances are there’s an extension for that.

Its templating/theme system uses simple blocks of code you plug into a single index.php file instead of using multiple files that piece together your design. This makes it drastically simple to create your own custom themes.

Joomla!’s only major drawback is its content organization. You have content items (a document) that are stored in categories (a folder) that are stored in sections (a filing cabinet). Say you have this organizational pattern: Instruments > Woodwinds > Clarinets > Mouthpieces. You could not use a multiple level tree-structure to do this. You would have to have section named Instruments and use a category named Mouthpieces. (Instruments > Mouthpieces).

Built-in search engine friendly URLs, XHTML & CSS valid, user registration, more extensions than you can shake a stick at (3500+), and the peace of mind knowing that you have a highly active community of 205,000 strong behind you, make this web application worth spending time with.