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Need to get a popular open source application up and running quickly?  Maybe you want to try out WordPress or Joomla but don’t know how to get started?

Bitnami has this figured out.  Bitnami offers what they call ’stacks’.  You can either download an application ’stack’ like Drupal, WordPress, etc. Or you can download a platform ’stack’ (WAMP = Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and then download application modules for that particular stack.

Sample Bitnami Applications

At work we’ve been looking at various bug trackers and I wanted to get Mantis setup and running but didn’t want to spend a lot of time getting it up and running.  After a bit of Googling I found Bitnami and gave it a try.

Installation was a breeze.  I ran the installer and only had to define a port for Apache to run on (I selected 88 so it didn’t conflict with my ColdFusion install) and a default username and password for login.  Installation took awhile - it IS installing quite a bit of stuff.  When it was done I simply hit my localhost and Mantis was up and running!

Bitnami does provide an uninstaller which seems to clean up after itself fairly well.  I first installed the Mantis stack but realized it had some drawbacks. If you download for example the WordPress application stack and set it to port 88 and then try to install another application stack you will have to provide another port.  It sets each application up independently.   To get around this they offer the platform stacks like WAMP.  Now you can install that as your base and then install multiple application ‘modules’ on top of it - all sharing one port.

Bitnami is free and stacks are available for Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris.

Balsamiq is a really cool application that allows you to easily mock up page layouts.

Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

What’s neat about Balsamiq is that’s it’s built on AIR.  So installation is just a simple click, and you are up and running, and it’s cross platform.

I like the pencil sketch elements which hopefully will keep people for focusing in on colors and other design elements during initial layouts.  The sample screenshots give you an idea of what can be created.  You can export as PNG or as XML so other Balsamiq users can import your sketches.

I only ran into a few glitches - some of the elements seem to be transparent while others are not so you run into some weird overlap issues.  It would be nice to have a control to flip the transparent state on/off.  Another useful addition would be the ability  to create your own ‘libraries’ of elements to use.

Sample Balsamiq Mockup

Balsamiq is not freeware - he’s asking $79 with a few options to get it for free.  Considering the amount of time you would have to spend in Photoshop to do the same thing - I think it’s a bargain if you do a lot of these types of mockups.