Fantastico De Luxe by Netenberg is an add-on for the popular cPanel web management software, available on many web hosting providers. It promises an easy, turn-key installation of dozens of web applications, including the Drupal CMS.

Unfortunately, while it may appear to fulfill those promises, the only thing Fantastico really gives you is a broken, insecure install that is hard to update. That's why we strongly advise the Drupal community not to use Fantastico to install and run a production Drupal site.

Don't just take our word for it however: take a look at the many support threads in our forums discussing problems with Fantastico. Its users have consistent problems with the installation and upgrading of even a simple Drupal site, let alone one which uses one of the many contributed modules available on our site. There are multiple reports of corrupted databases, lost files and broken installations.

You can also forget about security and stability with Fantastico: Drupal's latest release is 4.7.2, but Fantastico still offers version 4.7.0, with known security issues and various other bugs. It gets worse: whenever a new Drupal version is released, you must not just wait for Fantastico itself to be updated, but for this new version to be installed by your provider as well. A quick random sampling on Google shows that many web hosts themselves run old versions of Fantastico, offering versions of Drupal that are up to 2 years out of date.

There are two important consequences.

1. Fantastico places an unfair burden on the volunteers who help out in the Drupal support forums. Netenberg makes money selling its broken product to various web hosts, but washes its hands in innocence while we are expected to provide support for their users.
2. Fantastico makes Drupal look buggy and broken, which reflects poorly on the many contributors who have worked hard to make Drupal what it is today.

In our eyes, Fantastico hurts Drupal and its users more than it does good. However, Drupal remains open-source and GPL-licensed, so we cannot prevent anyone from making their own derivative installers. We can only warn you about what you could be getting into. Fantastico makes it harder, not easier, to run a secure and up-to-date Drupal site.