Squarespace is a hosted content management system that empowers website owners and designers with tools to build websites (business, blogs, portfolio..) easily while removing the most annoying parts of the process.

First of all, there are lots of professionally designed templates (with each template having various style variants) to choose from which can be used "as is" or updated completely to suit your needs.

Websites are created, edited and managed while browsing them. With the help of an in-site editor, editing everything and adding new content (with images, videos, etc.) is a breeze.

And, if you already have a website built with one of the well-known blogging systems like WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or TypePad, Squarespace can import all the content (with comments) into your new website.

There are powerful widgets that can be inserted into any part of the web pages with few clicks. Some of these widgets are: site search, tag cloud, custom forms, links to social network accounts and much more.

Actually, social network integration deserves more words as it is possible to display latest tweets from your Twitter, images from Flickr or items from RSS feeds.

For photographers or anyone to showcase their portfolio, customizable photo galleries with Lightbox integration, hover effects and auto-image-resizing make sure the output is easily manageable and charming.

There is a built-in analytics engine that informs website owners with the most important metrics like visitors/pageviews, keywords, referrers, latest activity and more.

In order to manage a Squarespace website, you don't even have to be online with a desktop as, thanks to its iPhone, iPad and Android applications, the websites can be under control anytime, anywhere.

And, the complete platform is hosted in a high-quality cloud system which ensures that the website can handle any traffic and uptime is something not to worry about.

This website builder has different pricing plans that meets the requirements of standard-to-advanced systems and it can be tried free for 14 days.

As a note to web designers and agencies, multiple Squarespace websites can be controlled under the same account and there are discounts offered for such usage.

Info: This is a review of a paid application.

Many internet users are storing their images on photo sharing/hosting services like Flickr, SmugMug or Picasa to make sure they are easily reachable and backed up regularly.

OpenPhoto is an open source PHP application that encourages users to host their images in the cloud (Amazon S3, Rackspace CloudFiles, Google Storage, etc.) on their own and functions as a front-end to manage + present them.

This way, images stay totally under control of users, switching providers become much easier and users won't be limited with the capabilities offered by photo sharing/hosting services.

The front-end has a simplistic interface where photos are displayed as a grid, categorized with tags and searched easily. It is also mobile-friendly and has theming support.

OpenPhoto itself is built on top of the powerful API which makes it possible to improve it or integrate photos with any other apps.

Fork is an open source content management system that offers a user-friendly environment for building and managing a website.

It is built with PHP (uses Spoon)-MySQL and there are various mature extensions offered like a form builder, blogging, location, analytics (integrates with Google Analytics) or newsletter.

A few number of high-quality themes are offered for free to easily get started and also learn how it integrates with HTML.

Fork is definitely not as feature-rich as WordPress or other popular alternatives but it is lightweight, promising and improved regularly.

BaseKit, a powerful yet easy-to-use application for building websites online, is giving away 3 Business Packages (1 year term) to WRD readers.

In order to find out more about the stuff in the package and to join this giveaway, make sure you check the bottom of this article.

What is BaseKit?

Creating websites over the web is not something new. But, if you used such tools in the past, you should have experienced that there are usually too many limits forcing users to build websites in a fixed way.

BaseKit comes with a better approach that is flexible on every level and allows users to customize every part of the website but still keeping everything integrated. And, making it simpler for many.

There are 100+ templates (personal and business websites) to choose from with each having lots of ready-to-use color variations which functions as a base for the website and it can be customized/improved as you wish.

The websites are created with a slick drag 'n' drop interface which functions as a true WYSIWYG editor, things look exactly as the output, no surprises.

BaseKit has an impressive set of widgets that can be inserted into web pages. Besides inserting text, images and video, it is possible to place a Google Maps map, in-site search, sitemap, image carousel or commenting into any page with a click.

That's not all, a form builder helps creating any type of custom forms and collecting information. And, social widgets make sure the website is connected with your social profiles with the ability to display Twitter timeline, Flickr photos or RSS feeds (there are "Tweet This" and Facebook "Like" buttons too).

If you need further customization, it lets you to insert site-wide or page-specific scripts and edit the whole HTML-CSS.

BaseKit is an all-in-one package for creating a website meaning it handles hosting and domain management (optional) for you.

Also, one account can control many websites (which is great for web agencies or people with multiple websites) and multiple users can work on the same account. And, it has a multilanguage interface that supports various languages by default.

How to win the licenses?

BaseKit is giving away 3 Business Packages ($168 value/each) which includes:

• Unlimited access to our website builder
• Amazon S3 Hosting
• 1 Free Domain
• E-commerce (Google Check-Out) integration
• £30 Google Adwords voucher
• Premium Support

In order to get a chance to win one of them, simply comment to this article and winners will be selected randomly with the query below on 19 September 2011 (a week later):

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=2459 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck!

FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database (via Wikipedia).

Foafpress is an open source PHP web application and presentation engine for RDF data stored in files.

It makes aggregating and publishing data from multiple web sources via Linked Data possible.

The application can read RDFXML, Turtle + N-Triple files and supports automatic content negotiation, currently for RDFXML, Turtle, N-Triple, HTML and RSS.

There are ready-to-use templates and controllers for foaf:Person and foaf:Group.

It can create a merged activity stream from Atom/RSS feed resources, render Twitter and Identi.ca statuses including @account, URLs and #hashtag links and has icons for ~35 social websites (like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook).

Moto CMS, one of the leading Flash CMS and Flash template providers, is giving away 3 premium Flash CMS templates (at the price of $220 to $275 each) from their collection to WRD readers for free.

Moto Flash content management system is a powerful application that allows its users to create easily editable, professionally looking and SEO-friendly Flash websites with minimum efforts.

Moto CMS is available as a standalone version (for developers mostly) and along with a Flash CMS template (for both developers and the users with no programming knowledge).

The premium Flash templates are complete Flash websites with Moto CMS integrated that can easily be customized and then managed via the mostly intuitive control panel.

Each Moto CMS template is equipped with the set of built-in components and tools including:

• WYSIWYG Editor
• MP3 and media player components
• video and image gallery components
• the convenient image editor (that allows the users to edit images right within the control panel)
• news widget
• RSS module
• Google Maps widget
• contact form module
• and many more.

The template package includes:

• professional Flash design
• MotoCMS License
• lifetime Tech-Support
• inVersion software updates

and requires PHP 5.2+ with Zend Optimizer 3.3+ to run..

How to Win?

For joining the giveaway to win one of the premium Flash CMS templates, just comment to this post mentioning "why you would like to win".

For increasing your chances, you can tweet about this giveaway with:

• Giveaway of 3 @motocms Flash CMS Templates at WRD – RT this message & comment to participate! Details: http://bit.ly/mgCGiM (click to tweet easily)
• and post a new comment with the link of your tweet

The winners will be selected randomly on 7 June 2011 (1 week later) with the query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=2276 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck everyone!

WordPress is, without a doubt, a very powerful CMS application which makes creating and managing any type of website pretty easy.

Press2Flash is an open source AS3 framework that helps Flash developers to integrate their Flash-powered websites with the backend of this awesome CMS.

It uses XML for communicating with the WordPress API and there are no hacks or workarounds (so the system stays secure).

Besides creating, editing and deleting the contents, there is also support for other functions like featured images, tag cloud and more.

OSClass is an open source application, built with PHP-MySQL, for creating and managing a classifieds website.

It can be used to display any type and number of items in a categorized interface. Also, there are some sector-specific extensions (cars, jobs, real estate, dating, etc.) for creating lists easily.

The application has a customizable interface with a flexible theming support (there are already several themes provided).

And, besides the extensions mentioned above, there are few others for extending the functionality like Google Maps or PayPal integration, breadcrumbs navigation and more.

Bricolage is an open-source and enterprise-class content management system that makes creating, managing and publishing content very easy.

It is built with Perl, uses MySQL or PostgreSQL for storing data and has a powerful templating system (Mason, Template Toolkit, or PHP).

With the help of this templating system and the flexibility offered on every step, it is possible to build any type of websites.

Bricolage has a group and permission based user management system that eases working as a team where some users can be editors, others being designers, etc.

Besides many other standard CMS features, there is a very handy and built-in alert system which can be setup for many events like an article going online, being edited, etc. to get notified instantly.

Also, there is a well-documented API which enables you to pull and push any type of data from the system.

Textpattern is an open source content management system, built with PHP/MySQL, that offers a flexible usage for designers, publishers/bloggers and end-users.

The application uses built-in tags for retrieving and displaying dynamic content which gives you a complete control over the content and presentation.

With a minimalist admin interface that can be used by an unlimited number of admin users (with custom privileges), Textpattern has the capability to build any type of website with sections, categories and different page layouts.

There are many other features like password-protected articles, anti-spam comment system, integrated file/image management, SEO-friendly URLs and much more.

It can be extended with a huge list of ready-to-use plugins (writing new ones is pretty easy) and an active community + a detailed documentation helps finding answers to any questions.