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.
I know this is a little late, but I finally got around to setting up a Lighthouse project for CommunityEngine, so if you’ve found a bug, head over there quick and file it! Thanks!
Quick, go check out the CommunityEngine demo site (CommunityEngine is an open-source social networking plugin for Ruby on Rails). Notice anything new?
CommunityEngine has new default theme! Special thanks to Andres Galante for designing it!
PLEASE NOTE: if you are already using CE, this change may impact your application! The new theme replaces many of the old views, and if your application depends on them, I’d advise checking out the CommunityEngine Extras repository, where you can find all the old views, images, and stylesheets used in the old theme. The new theme is in place starting from version 0.10.1 of the plugin (here).
Enjoy! (More updates coming soon…)
Just wanted to let everyone know I tagged a new version of CommunityEngine which adds support for draft and published states for blog posts. Please note, this requires a new migration, so if you previously installed CE, you’ll have to run
ruby script/generate plugin_migration
and then
rake db:migrate
Don’t know about CommunityEngine yet? Well, it’s a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site. Read the announcement post or check out the CommunityEngine site.
MissingMethod is releasing CommunityEngine, an open source Rails social networking plugin that you can drop into your new or existing application, instantly giving you all the features of a basic community site.
Lately there have been a raft of Rails social networking applications, so how is this one different? Well, other open source solutions like LovdByLess and OneBody are packaged as complete applications, while CommunityEngine is built as a plugin. This makes it easy to customize and even override its functionality.
For people who are interested in adding community features to an existing application, or for people who want to manage multiple communities using common code, CommunityEngine should be quite useful.
Remember DiggDong (the dashboard widget that lets you keep track of your Digg submissions automatically)? Well, you can now check out the source from my project repository:svn checkout http://missingmethod-projects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/widgets/DiggDong
Happy coding!
Here at Curbly headquarters, we’re using DiggDong, a Mac OS X dashboard widget that keeps track of Diggs your stories have gotten. It refreshes periodically in the background, and will let you know (using Growl, if you have it) when there are new Diggs. So you take your fingers off of Command-R and take a bathroom break.
UPDATE: New Version posted! (12/14/06 12:15pm)
Download the DiggDong! widget for Mac OS X
It looks like this:
I’ll be making some of the Ruby on Rails plugins I’ve written available for checkout via SVN. I took some time today to set up the repository and add the first plugin, DecimalMigrations.
DecimalMigrations allows you to use decimal numbers when naming your Rails migrations, which comes in handy when you have to go back and change an old migration or insert something new. This obviously goes against some of the logic of migrations in Rails, and it’s basically an ugly hack, so please use it carefully and sparingly.
To install:
ruby script/plugin install http://missingmethod-projects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/decimal_migrations/
Or just check out the source from Subversion:
svn checkout http://missingmethod-projects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/