There are many times when a script that someone else has written is better than writing one yourself or paying a consultant to write one. This is becoming more and more prevalent as the web matures — especially when referring to scripts that are absolutely free. There is so much out there now, though, here are some tips for finding the best products for your task.

1. Find a script that has been update recently

If it has been more than 6 months since a script has been updated with a newer version, any bugs in it probably will not be fixed by the owner of the script. If you pick a script that is no longer being updated, chances are you will have to fix any bugs yourself or upgrade any obsolete functionality as new versions of the programming language come out and you upgrade that.

2. Find a script written in a programming language that you could modify, if you needed to.

If you don’t know any languages, stick to scripts written in PHP. It is easier to understand than Perl and you won’t have to worry about downloading the loads of extra libraries that Perl scripts often require. Unlike some other platform-dependent programming languages, PHP runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OS-X servers, and often comes pre-installed on them, so you won’t have to do any work getting the script to run, and it will be compatible if you decide to migrate later on.

3. Make sure that if it requires a database, you have access to create databases and you have that database available on your server.

Especially with PHP scripts, this will most likely be a MySQL database. PHP handles a variety of databases, so if you are willing to do a little work, you can often adapt it to whatever database you have. Make sure that your hosting company allows you access to create databases, though.

4. Try out a variety of scripts

Don’t always stick with the first script. There are usually hundreds of scripts out there that do at least some of what you need. Test out a variety of scripts in the beginning before you get too far along. You may later discover that another script was available but you have received too much data to change scripts midstream.

5. Don’t pay for a script if a free one is as good or better

Free no longer means poorly-written, and more often than not, especially in the Unix and Linux worlds, the best products out there for web development are free. Apache is the best web server. PHP (in my humble opinion) is the best web development language. It stands to reason that there are free scripts out there that are as good or better than ones you can pay for. And there are. Trust me. But the real beauty of free scripts is that you often are free to modify the code as you see fit without worrying about any licensing issues.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Development Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.