Just a quick note to let those of you following CommunityEngine’s development know that I just added role support to the User model. This means a new migration (important!) and the ability to give users the role of ‘admin’, ‘moderator’ and ‘member’. Of course, you could easily add more roles if required by your application, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader ;)
The new roles code is in as of v0.10.3.
So, I had the domain Teacherly.com sitting around, and I’ve always liked the idea of a social network/blog for educators … so I made it, and CommunityEngine made it painless!
In about 6 hours, I modified the default CommunityEngine theme, integrated the famous Teacherly Free Wordsearch Creator, and deployed the whole thing to one of my EC2 instances. Not bad for an afternoon’s work!
Here’s a screenshot:
So, why is this cool? Well, I’ve always said the hard part about starting a niche community site is … building the community! Finding an audience, developing content, interacting with users… that’s what success hinges upon. So why should programming get in your way? With CommunityEngine, you can get up an running FAST, so you can start focusing on building your community, instead of building the web site for your community.