I just got my hosting account yesterday and after getting everything set-up I was looking through the CPanel and the Fantastico package.

With half a dozen choices for chat, bulletin boards and such, how do you determine which is best for each thing?

I'm thinging of just using soholaunch and not bothering with most of that other stuff.

Look for reviews and stuff like that, I use smf for my forum, because a mate told me to.

I was going to use YaBB, but he told me to use SMF.

I personally use phpBB3 for forums. there's a version of phpBB in fantastico, but it's only phpBB2 I believe that is in it.
Everything else I want to out on my site, I just make it myself

I don't really use CPanel that much except MySQL or MySQLadmin. Fantastico on the other hand is rather disapointing in my opinion because they lack mainatance in these products, doesn't really update them that much for newer releases. Most of the time, if I was going to install something, I would manual install them. Other features I use is awstats, how much visitor coming into and what pages is being used, etc. Is basically I used in Cpanel.

I don't use Cpanel much myself, partly because I am clueless with most of it....the fantastico is ok, but I realized the versions are behind for most of it....

I use AEF (anelectron.com) good forum software, not on fantastico but you have to upload all the files with an ftp account manually...

I don't understand though like what Phpmyadmin is and what MySQL databases are, and all those e-mail things, and cron jobs and frontpage extensions, and addon domains and PhpPGadmin, and any of the advanced tools or anything.....

Well at least I can get my site working =>

I use all of the stats part, they are useful to see how good your site is doing and to check to see if maybe you have out grown your current hosting plan (if it is using up too much bandwidth or your site is too big)

I also use phpmyadmin, this is hands down the most important tool for mysql databases I have EVER seen. You can do just about everything with this tool and most of it is automated (fill in a box and hit go)

Also the file manager is great if you just want to work on one file and don't feel like doing it through FTP. (for the most part i use FTP only for uploading and downloading, not downloading to work on something)

I honestly think Fantastico is overrated and is there for those with either too little knowledge (which in that case you probably shouldn't be doing it anyways) or who are too lazy to install things manually. And with it having outdated software its usefulness is extremely limited anyways.

Also setting up cronjobs (like backing up my forum's database every few days) is useful.

I've had a chance to get more familiar with it since I first asked and I see what you mean about not using much of it.

I did use Fantastico to set up some wordpress blogs and then updated them with file manager and Firezilla. I have also set up my email accounts through the mail function, which was interesting.

I've been mostly learning all about wordpress and thinking about using that for the website as well as the blogs.

Fantastico is very disappointing... I use phpBB3, SMF isn't very good and IPB is too expensive...

Otherwise I use file manager, the e-mail feature and the cgi-centre!

I agree, PHPBB3 is by far the best.