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Intranet developers looking to build a complex site on a budget should take note of WebGUI 7. Not only is it robust, easy, and full of advanced options, but it's also free.

Released by Plain Black Corporation, a Web development company based in Madison, Wisconsin, WebGUI started life as a toolkit for the company's president to use with his corporate clients, when developing features for their sites. He released it as open source to get feedback, and found that people preferred it as a site creation tool. Six versions later, he's added loads of features that make it competitive against paid options.

In WebGUI, creating and modifying pages is done with an intuitive browser-based system (see screen shot below). Users can easily set the type of page they want to make, then improve their sites with a long list of included applications. Adding polls, stock data, or a dashboard is easy with the built-in apps. Users can also plug in the project-management and time-tracking features to create a comprehensive routing system that automatically tracks time spent on projects.

Once you've created pages in WebGUI, editing them is as simple as logging in and selecting a block of content to edit. Changes are grouped together with version tags, and, if you're using a routing system, a supervisor can approve all the page changes at once and make them live. Moving content around your pages is a simple drag-and-drop operation, and an included search tool automatically indexes all content in real time and also indexes the contents of attached files and documents.

While WebGUI requires an IT person to install it and get it started, the program is versatile and will work with any database. It also integrates with LDAP systems, so that it can share your established system login information. You'll want to install the WebGUI runtime environment at the same time, which helps the product to run up to 300 percent faster than without it. WebGUI can't be grafted onto an existing set of static HTML pages, so you'll want to use it when just beginning a new intranet or extranet.

Even support is free with WebGUI. Users get 150 pages of help built into the program, and another 100 pages of help documents are live on the company's site. If that's not enough, the company sells access to an additional cache or 200 pages of help documentation, along with 200 tutorial videos, for $150 per year.

Other Plain Black support options include site hosting (ranging from $25 per month to much higher for large sites), personal training ($600 per person per day), and technical support ($500 per year for unlimited online support; $5,000 per year for an all-inclusive package that includes 10 hours of phone support per month). On-site training is available for an additional cost.

If you don't have the time or resources to devote to learning WebGUI, Plain Black will be happy to create your site for you. Contact them for prices, as pricing varies by the size of the project.

Editing pages is simple with WebGUI 7's browser-based interface. Once you enter the edit mode, the page is organized into blocks of editorial material which can then be edited or moved by dragging and dropping them into a new location.

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