Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

March 04, 2010

Fantastico vs. Simple Script

Controlling and managing a website requires a variety of skills and user-friendly tools. The amount of skills you have is beginning to matter less and less each day, as new tools are developed to compensate for the lack of skill. Most of the tools that are being developed to aid in the creation and management of websites are called web applications. These web applications are usually installed into the control panel of your hosting account, and can help you do nearly anything you'd like with your website, from complex design schemes to in-depth organization. Although these web applications are simple to use, the process of installing them is often not.

Quick-Installation Utilities

For this reason, there applications included in your hosting account's control panel that assist you in installing these web applications with the click of a mouse. The main quick-installation utilities are Fantastico and Simple Script.  Different web hosting companies offer different installation utilities, so you'll want to choose wisely when considering which web hosting provider you'll be hosting your site with. The following information should help you decide between the two main quick installation applications – Fantastico and Simple Script.

Fantastico

Fantastico is by far the widely used and well known quick-installation utilities available, as it is included with the popular cPanel control panel. Fantastico lets you install popular web applications and CMS like WordPress and others. With a few clicks of the mouse, an installation that would have otherwise taken at least 10 minutes, can be performed in seconds. Fantastico is renowned for it's user-friendliness and extreme simplicity. However, Fantastico has stopped offering support for WordPress and a number of other applications, and therefore the versions of WordPress that it installs are  outdated. If you install WordPress with Fantastico, you'll be using an outdated copy with no navigation bar on the left side. This alone has caused many people to switch over to Simple Scripts.

Simple Scripts

Simple scripts is very similar to Fantastico, in that it automatically installs web applications with just a few clicks of the mouse. However, Simple Script seems to have picked up where Fantastico left off, as it now offers support for all of the web applications that Fantastico stopped supporting. For this reason, many of you will not have a choice other than to use Simple Scripts during the installation process. For example, if you want to install Wordpress on your site, you really cannot do this with Fantastico anymore, unless you'd prefer an outdated version.

Conclusion

I don't know anybody that would prefer an outdated version of any software, so it would seem logical that you may prefer to use Simple Scripts. WordPress is not the only web application that Simple Scripts installs with ease, in fact it offer more installation assistance than Fantastico ever did! The user interface is also much more visually appealing in Simple Scripts, and the navigation is very simple. Overall, Simple Scripts is the new standard and Fantastico has a rival worthy of contention.

Tags: Wordpress,  web applications,  Simple Script,  fantastico,  cPanel Tutorials,  control panel,  CMS