I love start pages. Sure, I usually load my bookmarks, but having a lot of useful info inside a single Web page is also a pretty good idea, and I must confess that, despite the fact Netvibes is my all-time favorite, I recently started playing with iGoogle from time to time, just to get to know it better. These begin said, it’s no surprise that bumping into an open source script allowing you to build similar pages made me instantly decide to write about it…
… so this is how you end up facing this short article about Picok. The name comes from “personal information cockpit,” and not “peacock,” as I was tempted to believe at first sight. 😉
Picock is a multi-user script that’s a great choice for intranets, since the user of the admin account can choose the available components that regular users can select from the list, so they won’t start their work days checking funny movies again… but that only works if various Internet access limitations are in place, and since that would take the discussion somewhere else, let’s stop here, shall we?
Sure, existing items can be easily configured, dragged around using the mouse, minimized, and so on, offering about the same functionality as most startup pages (including even a multi-language interface and support for integrating Lotus Notes, Doodle, Wikipedia, Google Maps content!) you may find online these days, only that those aren’t exactly open source…
Oh, one more thing – Picok requires PHP & MySQL, but can also work with Microsoft SQL Server, or IBM Lotus Notes, and the demo is available here(user/pass “demo” works well, but you can also create a custom demo account). Enjoy!
Compatibility: all major browsers, obviously
