IM Creator is a very easy to use and hosted website builder that allows anyone to create good-looking websites without diving into any HTML-CSS or JavaScript.

There are many creative templates to choose from where all of them are optimized for search engines and looking good on mobile too.

Once the template is picked from a well-categorized list (it is also possible to start with a blank template), the site can be edited live with drag ‘n’ drops.

Inserting new galleries, slideshows, contact forms or menus is just a click away. All of them presented nicely and user-friendly.

One of the most frequent jobs while creating a website, editing images are also handled within IM Creator. There is a built-in image editor for resizing or cropping images.

Also, there are lots of widgets to enhance the website like Google Maps, Twitter timeline, SoundVCloud, Vimeo, Facebook and more.

Websites can integrate with any Google Analytics account, come with free e-mail accounts and new templates are introduced regularly.

How to join the giveaway?

3 lifetime subscriptions (valued $95/year) are being given away. In order to join:

• Leave a comment below telling us what your favorite template from IM Creator is (view their collection and please share the link)
• “Like” IM Creator page on facebook.com/imcreator

Winners will be announced a week later (13 May 2013) and announced here. Good luck to all.

The winners

Here they are:

• Ciril Trcek (comment #1264273)
• Firebit (comment #1264343)
• Lukas Janda (comment #1264236)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for being a part of this giveaway.

Moot is a fresh and free web service for instantly creating a discussion environment on any web page.

It is setup so quickly. The service provides you a unique HTML code and, once embedded into any web page, Moot appears.

Btw, Moot loads the full HTML and it is no IFRAME. This makes all types of customizations possible. You can apply CSS or even change interactions via JS.

The service provides a single feed of posts, users can follow any number of topics, view other online users or make searches quickly.

It can be a flat or threaded discussion, works in real-time (no refresh required), has an easy-to-use control panel and supports responsive layouts.

When it comes to the word “social network”, Facebook and Twitter are probably the first ones that come to the mind. And, creating a new one can sounds like “creating an alternative to them (which is kinda crazy)”.

However, there are lots of niche social networks out there which are used by millions of people. And, creating a new one is not something crazy, actually, something not that hard.

Dolphin, a professional PHP web application, is the most popular self-hosted solution for building such communities.

The application has all the core features (and more) that can be expected from social networks like connecting with friends, status updates, messaging, chats, image/video sharing, groups or events.

Members can discuss on forums, have personal pages or blogs and there are even e-commerce features where the site owner and/or members can create stores and sell stuff.

Visitors can register with their e-mails or sign-up with Facebook Connect to see which other Facebook friends are there (also invite them).

Considering audio/video is shared too much on social networks and handling audio/video streaming +processing can be expensive, Dolphin has a custom media server that takes care of this.
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Ok, copying is not good.. but getting inspired from other successful projects and learning from them definitely makes sense.

Pinry, an open source web application, eases building Pinterest-like (dynamic-column-grid-layout) websites.

It allows users to register to the app and pin, tag and share media (images, videos and webpages) quickly.

And, a bookmarklet exists for saving the content without leaving the pages being browsed.

The application is built with Python (Django) and it is a good starting for creating a community around pinning contents or a bookmarking site for personal use.

When launching a new web project, having a “coming soon” page that collects e-mails of users to notify them about the launch is pretty common.

The same also goes for some other landing pages that ask users to fill a form to move forward.

Desant is an open source, single page web application (in Backbone.js managed by Sinatra backend) for handling such cases with ease.

Any page built with it can easily collect user information via forms, it keeps track of the referring URLs and the locations of visitors (by country).

It uses MySQL for storing data and can be installed manually or quickly with Vagrant.

Edicy is a hosted and professional CMS platform that enables designers and developers to create new sites and/or integrate any existing sites.

The platform doesn’t require a hosting account, anything to be installed and  it is always up-to-date + secure.

Many templates exist to get started with or new ones can be created with the help of a powerful templating engine.

And, optionally, there is a desktop designer tool which actually launches a small webserver that can render Edicy‘s templates. So that you can keep designing sites in your favorite editor.

There is an easy-to-use content editor to edit sites while browsing, it has a built-in and advanced image editor where you can upload with drag ‘n’ drops and rotate, crop, resize them.

Besides images, videos, tables, maps and other widgets can be inserted within few seconds. Also, a form engine exists to create any type of forms and collect data (they can be exported too).

Websites created don’t need to be all static, it can work with databases or product catalogues, has a blog engine and can be integrated with 3rd party apps.

Another very useful feature is the ability to offer the same website in different languages. Once a new language is added, Edicy simply asks you to insert the translated texts.

The service has many other features from password-protected pages to, statistics or the ability to managing your domains.

To sum up, Edicy is very handy for anyone willing to create their own site or a bunch of sites for their customers (and get support when needed).

It costs almost the price of a quality hosting account (which is included) and 300,000+ sites are already being managed by it.

Koken is a free and self-hosted CMS (PHP-MySQL) that is focused on building websites where portfolio/gallery is in the core (like designer or photographer sites).

The application has a powerful media manager for the images and videos. It allows organizing items as categories, date captured, license and more.

It has a simple and flexible content editor that allows editing with live previews. Also, inserting media, slideshows or social content (like tweets, Flickr, Instagram and Vimeo) is possible.

Koken has a templating engine for building new themes. And, it is currently in beta but will soon have plugins for extending further.

Also, for Adobe Lightroom users, there is a free “publish services” plugin for easily updating, editing and replacing content.

Forums used to be (and maybe still) the most standard place online where users discuss.

They are evolving in many ways with sites like Reddit, Q&A systems or simplified versions.

Discourse is also a discussion platform (built with Ruby on Rails) that is not complicated for end-users, eases reaching to the content easy and has various social tools.

First of all, there are no pages to navigate, just scrolling is enough. It is possible to mention users like Twitter and has support for real-time updates.

It remembers where you last left reading, reply to the entries quickly, send a quick-reply-invite to friends so that they can reply without registering and login/register with any social network accounts.

Discourse makes categories optional, they can be created or not, has an admin for controlling everything and an API for expanding it further.

If you are looking for a quick way to create a good-looking portfolio website, there is a nice and professional option for that: Showkase.

Showkase is a self-hosted, PHP-powered and very easy-to-use app for building HTML5 portfolio websites.

It has a portfolio-focused, simplified admin interface where new pages (about and contact us pages) can be added, galleries can be created and images uploaded.

Images can be uploading with multiple ways, Showkase auto-creates the thumbnails and they can be ordered with drag ‘n’ drops.

The galleries can be presented with a choice of multiple viewers (JuiceBox or SimpleViewer) where both supports a chic navigation with thumbnails prev-next and/or bullet navigation options.

There are 3 built-in themes and new themes can be created with ease (uses Smarty 3 template engine).

Besides these galleries, there is also a “Library” feature for uploading images and using them within the site.

Websites created work pretty fast as the app creates lightweight HTML pages and doesn’t make any database queries.

Also, when it comes to different devices and browsers, Showkase themes are responsive and they work well on tablets + mobile as well.

The giveaway

Showkase is giving away 3 Standard licenses ($49/each) to WRD readers.

In order to join the giveaway, just comment this article and winners will be sent 1 week later (4 Feb 2013) randomly with the query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=3627 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck.

The winners

Here they are:

• dan linsky (comment #1066874)
• Aaron F. (comment #1065950)
• Barry (comment #1070139)

Congratulations.

Grappelli is a free and open source project, built with Django, that can empower any website with an admin interface.

It is a skin to the Django’s default admin interface which has a plain, grid-based and good-looking design (uses Compass for styling) and offers some extras.

There is a built-in WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE), search with auto-completes, several jQuery plugins and sorting data with drag ‘n’ drops.

Also, its dashboard can be customized with ease and works well with the django-filebrowser extension.