If you are BlueHost’s customer, by now you may have received an email informing you that a new way of installing variety of web applications is now available for you- Simple Scripts:
What is Simple Scripts? Think of Fantastico Installer, which allowed you to install scripts that ended up powering your websites in just few clicks and under five minutes. Simple Scripts, a brain child of BlueHost, allows you to do the same. The difference is that Simple Scripts has the most up to date installations for WordPress, Joomla and many other similar applications. Keeping up to date some of these scripts on your website is crucial. Take for example Technorati‘s recent raid against spam. For users who are not accustomed to upload the updates via FTP, generally meant waiting several weeks for the new version to be reflected in Fantastico. By that time a newer version of the script was already released. Now clients of BlueHost, Hostmonster and FastDomain web hosting providers can have the latest updates within hours instead of weeks.
Matt Heaton announcing the Simple Scripts several days ago, had mentioned that although application is originally launched on Blulehost it is a self hosted application and that any web hosting provider can license it and use it for the benefits of their users.
I have tried to install WordPres using Simple Scripts, and it worked faster and more efficient than Fantastico scripts. However, Simple Scripts doesn’t seem to recognize the (previous) installations made with Fantastico. I did not attempt any upgrades of such installation for the fear of deleted or damaging existing databases. It would be wise if creators of Simple Scripts would write a guide of how to make this transition for Fantastico to Simple Scripts.
The new solution looks very attractive and it will not be a big surprise if other web hosting providers do not jump at opportunity to provide their clients with the latest possible applications and scripts.
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SimpleScripts did do a writeup on migrating from Fantastico.
http://www.simplescripts.com/?p=articles/migrating_from_fantastico
This is good news from a security point of view. Most exploits of systems happen because the auto install set-up does not do the update soon enough to stop the (relatively slow) development of scripts for script kiddies. Fantastico is famous for this security problem.