Fantastico Being Replaced With Softaculous – AnHosting

For as long as I can remember, Fantastico has been the most popular form of auto installing WordPress without having to mess with the hassle of uploading files and configuring WP-Config. However, I logged into my cPanel account the other day and noticed a long message from AnHosting.

We’re glad to announce availability of a new tool to help install software on your account: Softaculous – Instant Installs! Softaculous has replaced Fantastico in your account, providing more software for automatic installation and upgrade. New features are available including a user-feedback rating system, software demonstrations, and more. Softaculous currently offers 131 applications and scripts for quick, easy installation, with more arriving every day.

The good news, at least for those with AnHosting accounts is that any installs of WordPress that were performed with Fantastico have already transitioned to Softaculous. Softaculous has a new interface for installing scripts than what I’m used to with Fantastico. The list of scripts is on the left hand side but there are icons in the top right portion of the screen with a center column dedicated to content related to the scripts. One of the biggest differences for me is that I’m now able to automatically install WordPress MU.

How the merging of WordPress MU into WordPress will affect these auto installs is beyond me. I’m sure it won’t be that hard of an upgrade path. The other interesting thing I noticed is that this script installer is that each script has a rating as well as reviews by end users. WordPress 2.9.2 has a rating of 4.75. The reviews I read were short and sweet despite having 500 characters to work with.

I was a little disheartened to see that WordPress was filed under the Blog category and not the Portal/CMS category but it’s nothing to worry about. Softaculous provides the same easy script installation routine that Fantastico users were familiar with, so don’t be alarmed if you see this show up in a control panel near you.