Hello and welcome to Video #5, and in this particular video you’re going to learn what is Softaculous and how to use it.
Softaculous replaced Fantastico, which is basically a popular suite of software scripts that you can build into your website, things like WordPress, Joomla, if you want a forum, you can build forums. There are a lot of many different free scripts that you have access to, that you don’t have to spend extra money for, they are all built in. So in other words it gives you access to things like WordPress, blogs, bulletin boards, even support help desk and more.
So you’ll be given an overview of this suite and how to use it properly and we’ll show you how to install things like WordPress in a few clicks of your mouse. So where is located can differ from different people, but for the most of you it should be located somewhere down near the bottom. So if you keep scrolling down, we’ll see it here, so we see that it says the Softaculous Apps Installer. So what’s nice about this you have access to tons of scripts that you can potentially use and just be aware that you want to pick and choose what you want. It’s super easy to go trigger happy and try to install as much as possible, but just keep in mind that the more you install the slower your website is. So pick and choose wisely, maybe one or two or three max.
So let me just do a quick run through here. So we’ve got blogs, we’ve got microblogs, and if you click these links down below, these are categories and these are all the scripts. So if you are not really sure which one to choose, if can click on blogs here, you’ll be actually able to see all the blogs. So as we can see here we’ve got WordPress, we’ve got Open Blog, we’ve got Serendipity, and there’s a lot more, I’m not going to go through every single one. But if you click on blogs it will categorize it, and then you can look through, we’ve got Microblogs, we’ve got Portals or Content Management Systems, like Joomla and all that. There is also specialized ones for real estate and more. We’ve got forums, so let’s say for example we want a community, you want to create a community, click Forums, we’ve got phpBB , we’ve got SMF, and we’ve actually tried SMF’s. SMF is really good, phpBB is good, bbpress is also good. And we have Image Galleries. Now keep in mind, if you are installing something like WordPress you don’t really need all of these, you can actually create all these within WordPress by using WordPress plugins. And then we have Wikis, we have Social Networking, we have Calendars, we have Analytics, we have E-Commerce.
So there are tons and tons of stuff here, but at the end of the day, the best way to know exactly what to install is to figure out ok, what is my plan, what is my vision, does it actually match in what I’m trying to do and then go from there.
Now in this particular video I am going to show you how easy it is to install, so I’m going to click on WordPress here. And you’re going to see within a few clicks and a few things that we need to enter, we’re going to create a WordPress site really, really fast. So all you need to do is simply scroll down and click on install now and then it’s going to say Software Setup. So you want to choose your protocol which if you are using a SSL certificate you want to use https://. And then if you’re not then use one of these two, and then one of these. And of course you want to choose your domain name and the reason why this is listed is because if you have a subdomain name, you can actually you can install it in there. And then of course the directory, if you leave this blank, it’s going to install it at yourdomain.com, if you’re into a directory it’s going to install it within a directory within yourdomain.com. So if it’s wp for example, it will be yourdomain.com/wp. So if somebody goes to your domain.com they’re not going to see the WordPress site, so hopefully that makes sense.
So once you’ve done that then what you want to do is enter your Admin account, so your Admin username and password. Now I will say by default it does have you enter admin, but it’s highly advised not to use the word admin, because most WordPress blogs use that and it’s super easy for people to hack into your site. So make sure you change something that is not admin, and not even any words inside of your domain name. So we’ll just do something like that. And then of course we got the password, and then of course you’ll enter your email, you’ll enter your site language and then you’ll choose what you want. Here you can always choose the theme later. We’ll just select this here and you can enter the email details that you want it sent to, so you have it, that information in the feature and you click install, and that’s it. So that’s how easy it is to literally install the scripts. If you were to do this manually, and install WordPress manually, it would actually take you literally about 30 minutes, if you’d knew what you’re doing. If you’d didn’t know what you’re doing, it would probably take you about an hour to do, even though they say it’s a 5 minute install. With Softaculous it skips the process, and it allows you to install softwares, a variety of different software’s really, really fast.
So hopefully that opens your eyes to the potential software scripts that you’re going to install really, really fast.