fantastico.pngFantastico is a great tool for installing software by the click of a button. All affordable web hosting providers promote it for quick and easy site building.

It is ironically, that I have to caution you from using it even though I offer affordable web hosting.

It is great to build sites and experiment with, however if you are serious about building a site, be it wordpress or an image gallery, you have to think before using it.

Let me ask you these 2 questions:

  • Do you want your site to be safe?
  • Do you want your site to be as unique?


If you answer Yes to any of these questions, then I would recommend you to manually install your software.

The reason is that Fantastico install is a straight forward and has no security in its intention.

For wordpress blogs for instance, you need to change the table prefix ( make you database tables unique ). This will prevent cross site scripting and sql injection.

When you customize your site and need to upgrade, and use Fantastico, it can cause you a lot of headache and frustration. Here you will have to manually make sure you get all your customizations uploaded.

I know that most customizations could be done in templates, but there are core files that I had to change in order to customize my site that will mess any Fantastico upgrade.

Another good side effect of upgrading manually, is that you will become familiar with your scripts. This is important, because help is not always quick and sometimes could be very costly.

In general, when a new version of the software is released, the guys at Fantastico will release a new version to their auto installer that supports that software weeks or months after the software is released.

You might have already noticed software available through Fantastico is not always up to date.

No one can give you an estimated time, except for the folks at Fantastico who integrate the software into their installer.

Of course, if you are in a hurry, look for secure upgrade, you can upgrade manually.

I encourage you to learn about your software and install manually and as always if you need any help let me know and I will do the research and let you know.

Alex Sysoef wrote about 3 reasons not to use Fantastico, click here to visit his post.

Let me know what you think?

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