I'm quite happy with myself I've finally setup my slack box to host my own website. I'm using dyndns for the url. And now for fun I would like to see if I can host a few of my friends (for free) the way google, geocities, lycos, etc... do. I would like to offer a WYSIWYG as well as a source notepad type of situation and of course they would have to have their own seperate accounts and passwords and etc... The only problem is I don't know a darn thing about programming and I would like to get my little experiment off sooner than it would take me to learn. (Plus the only language I'm even starting to study is Java which doesn't seem to be useful for the web anymore).

I was wondering if there were any free (prefer opensource but if it's not thats cool) software that could help me with this experiment. What type of software would I be looking for maybe even how to begin my search. Thanks!

Browse opensourcecms.com for some possible open source solutions to host friends, if they want a blog or whatnot..

You can also probably search for free scripts and use WYSIWYG as the search term to implement any free ones for editing web pages in space you allocate for friends, etc.

I'm not sure cms is exactly what I'm looking for. What I want is a "replica" of the abilities that altavista, geocities, and other such build your webpages on their site programs have. Only I would prefer it to be opensource.

I was also hoping that users who currently do what I'm looking to do would give suggestions as to what specific program/script/whatever they use.

Now if I'm mistaken and I really don't know what I'm talking about, and cms is the tool to use to do what I want please tell me how to get it to do what I want.

What I don't want is something where writers can just insert articles. I want users to insert full blown webpages.

Caution:
Check the rules for your ISP---many of them do not allow hosting of web sites (or the operation of any kind of server)

The site I pointed out has more than cms applications to pick and choose from, etc.

If you have a c-panel on your web server see if it has Fantascio That has tons of auto-install progams up to and including forums blogs wikis etc...

If not google fantascio for info...