In college, I took a class called Internet Business Applications. In this class, I gained experience with using open source content management systems (CMS). Drupal, an open software, leverages the contributions from thousands of brilliant coders around the world. Drupal gave me the basic framework for which I was able to create and customize FindHype.com (a social bookmarking site similar to Digg and Reddit)s. Since then, I have created several other websites using various open source platforms such as Joomla and WordPress. For anyone who wants to make their own web 2.0 website but doesn’t have a lot of technical experience, my suggestions of open source platforms are:

Drupal – very robust and customizable, check out Drupal.org for more

WordPress – the best for bloggers

Joomla – plenty of great templates and plug-ins

phpBB – used by many popular forums

A full list of popular CMS platforms can be found here.