OpenX is a free open source ad server software developed in the past years by a devoted open source developer community. Their website is www.openx.org . For now, they have the software as downloadable and installable on your server but they are beta-testing a hosted version of it (so you can use it without being necessary to download and install it).

It was started in 1998 by Tobias Ratschiller, the creator of also popular phpMyAdmin (a MySQL database web administration tool). Scott Switzer continued his work building on Tobias’ code. Today he is the co-founder of OpenX Limited, the company behind the ad server software.

OpenX was known as OpenAds, phpAds, phpAdsNew and MaxMediaManager but finally the company settled down for the OpenX name in 2008. The company which is behind OpenX got two rounds of funding: 5.5 Million dollars in 2006 and 15.5 million dollars in 2008 and this means it will have plenty of cash to improve its product and make it top-notch (not that it’s not already).

Over 30,000 publishers and advertisers around the world uses this ad server software platform to maximize their online advertising results. The current version of OpenX is 2.4 with a 2.5 beta version in the works (this review is for 2.4 version mainly).

You can download the current version here: www.openx.org/download

OpenX let you choose banners, campaigns and terms that fits you best. It has a sophisticated tracking system which let you gather statistics and optimize the results.
In short, you can take the control of your advertising without having to pay big bucks to big boys.

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Sharemixer www.sharemixer.com is a Youtube clone (video sharing solution) developed in Zagreb, Croatia by a company having over ten years of web development expertise and currently moving to media market.

It has a ton of features too long to be listed here so you can look on their website here.

Sharemixer license cost $199 with one year support, $299 with two years support, $499 with lifetime support and there is special $100 offer for Clipshare owners to migrate to Sharemixer. The license can be also purchased as subscription service for $39 per month.

Their additional services pricelist is long so seems that this company would like to make more money selling services rather than from their software licensing.

Installation and Setup
To use Sharemixer, the hosting service should have Linux, BSD or Apache server with MySql 4.1 running, PHP 4.4.3 and up (including PHP 5) and access to CGI-BIN directory. It should also have FFMpeg with Lame, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder-MPlayer, Rubby on Rails and flvtool2 installed (this extra server-side software is required, to inject meta-data to the converted videos - key-frames, tags, title, etc. FLVTool2 is used for that and it depends on Ruby On Rails to work.). To checkout details of the server requirements please look here.

The MySQL database must be created manually from provided script and the configuration parameters should be configured manually in several files, including assigning proper directory rights so some technical knowledge will be needed to install it.

To migrate from Clipshare you should run a different database script, configure the files and delete some older directories.

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osTicket www.osticket.com is a popular open source customer support ticket system based on PHP and MySQL. It supports both web-based and email based ticket systems. So your customers can either log on to your website to raise a support ticket or they can simply send an email to support. osTicket integrates both channels into a simple web-interface which lets your support staff manage the tickets and provide support to your customers.

There are commercial systems out there which have a whole lot of features that most support staff seldom uses. osTicket is a good way to start your support operations and then (maybe) if your needs are not being met, you might think about changing it. Notice since it is open source you might easily be able to customize it to meet your needs.

Of course, being open source, it is also complete free.

This open source project was recently revived by its authors after a lull of over a year. They started releasing a new version of the product in January this year with the latest release a few days ago. They have a very active forum community of over 700 members with over 1300 posts catering to various topics around osTicket.

Technical Specifications
osTicket requires a web server that can run:

• PHP 4.3 or better
• MySQL 4.1 or better

That’s it. Being PHP and MySQL driven, you can be sure that it will run on your hosting provider’s space. If you host it on IIS on a Windows box, then also you are safe because Windows version of both PHP and MySQL are available.

In terms of hardware, there are no specific requirements. Most shared webhosting hardware is good enough to run this. The users only need to interact with this using a browser.

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PHPMotion is a truly free open source media social networking platform supporting video and audio social networking.
It’s downloadable from www.phpmotion.com website after you had registered to the software support forum.

Latest stable version was 1.2 but I tested and evaluated version 2 beta which worked without any crashes and with only small inconveniences.

The product installation was quick however you must have lot of open source modules pre-installed to your server, including LAME MP encoder, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder and MPlayer, FFMpeg-PHP, GD Library 2, etc. which was taking a week of my time to get those running afterwards to find out that my service provider does not support background processes and MP3, MPEG files download.

So you should consider the hosting service where those modules are already installed. PhpMotion website lists four of hosting ready service providers, where the starting price $2.99 was per month.

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Nucleus CMS www.nucleuscms.org is an open source content management blogging platform with many features and plug-ins available to grow your business online.

Nucleus CMS is available for free under the GNU General Public License. NucleusCMS was created by the Nucleus Group in 2002. It was later developed and expanded to be the extensive version that exists today, by the international community called the CMS Team. Nucleus CMS was developed to have multiple weblog content visible on one page. It is designed with the ability to have multiple authors and administrators logging in to post or change configurations as necessary.

You can set up several categories to have a commenting and a voting system provided to enable your readers to share their thoughts and opinions of your posts. All of your urls are optimized for both reader and search engines. You can set the system up to automatically display your posts for future dates. This comes in handy for times when you will be going on vacation or will find yourself unable to post on a regular basis.

There are many changes you can make to create your own unique look through skins, templates, and CSS files.

Many plugins are available to add to the features of your site such as NP_Newsletter, NP_blogstats, calendar, chat, weather forecasts, amazon search, and so many more. Plugins are designed by members of the community and are added daily to the growing database.

This system is simple enough for anyone to learn and expandable enough to allow you to build almost any website you imagine.

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