What is Fantastico?
Fantastico is a commercial script library that helps users install web applications on their site. It makes the process relatively quick and easy, even for inexperienced web users. Fantastico is run on the CPanel control panel, which is provided with a large amount of web hosting packages. There are believed to be over a million users of Fantastico worldwide, making it the market leader for a product of this type.
Fantastico can help users install a variety of useful applications, with the most common being shopping carts, photo-sharing tools, blogs and web content management systems – also highly beneficial and potentially profitable tools for websites.
Most of these applications could instead be installed on a web server by using a command-line interface. CPanel-friendly add-on scripts will also help with application installation, but with both of these methods application software installation is all that can be achieved.
Fantastico offers the user considerably more control when installing applications than the above methods do. For example, the administrator will be given an overview of applications that have been installed on a chosen server, as well as the ability to set user permission levels – allowing or preventing individuals from installing their own applications. Using settings such as these, the administrator can also be informed when an installation or removal has been performed on the system.
Administrators that intend to use Fantastico should be aware of several issues before using the application. Firstly, installation scripts need to be kept up to date; otherwise the chosen application will not necessarily be the most recent version – they are not necessarily maintained by the ISP or web host. This can cause security risks or application instability. Administrators should also be aware that applications installed by Fantastico can be difficult to patch or update. Overall however, the benefits of using Fantastico far outweigh the negatives, and it will especially aid inexperienced web users in their quest to improve their website, offer more to their visitors, and ultimately gain an increased amount of sales and income.