Off-the-shelf Programs - Pros and Cons

Before you start to seek for the IT-consultant services, try to find the software that you need in the Internet. The chances that you will find it are very high. Look at http://freshmeat.net, http://sourceforge.net or at http://www.hotscripts.com. Actually, all programs were already written a long time ago (with rare exception ;-) If you need a trivial e-store or a content management system, just search at Freshmeat or Google. You will be surprised with the number of the free programs that meet your needs. If your goal is even simpler (forum or chat) then you risk to spend many hours looking through results.

There are few tricks here. We already have mentioned one of it - it's an abundance of the choices. It is very hard to find the best software among other similar programs and evaluate how good is it. The second feature is that you have to install the software yourself. It could be pretty hard even if you are familiar with computer. The most possible is that the program will be hosted at the another type of operating system than that is installed at your home or office computer. Even if the sentence "change file permissions to make the file writable for Apache user" does not sound senseless, it is still hard to find how to do it in Linux OS.

The next trick is that no matter how the program is good, you always will want more besides its functions. There could be a problem even for the experienced programmer. It would take months to understand how the program works, while that could be quicker to write the same program from the scratch. Each programmer has his own coding style and architectural techniques, and it is a little fun in the reading of the other people's scripts.

If you decided to use the ready software, then find out is the a support available (even if it is not free). Learn how large is its user base, are there thematic forums and sites where you can find an answers to your questions. Generally, use of the ready scripts has sense for a small tasks, like page counter or forum.

Some advices how to install ready programs:

• Carefully read the license in the file COPYING or LICENSE. GPL license may bother you to make changes in the source code.
• It is possible to install majority of the scripts with just the FTP access to the server.
• Software for the UNIX-like systems are usually distributed in the so-called tarball format. It has double extension .tar.gz. No panic, the WinZip can handle such an archives (with some limitations).
• Find the files README and INSTALL in the program's directory. Installation instructions are usually there.
• If was not specified otherwise, you should use BINARY mode when uploading binary files (images, executables) by ftp, and ASCII mode for script and program sources. If you will upload sources with BINARY mode there could be problems with its execution (files .pl, .cgi, .sh).
• Hosting support could help you install the program.