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.
I’ll be talking about using EC2 as a production deployment option for Rails apps at this weekend’s MinneBar, and to be honest, at this point the discussion will revolve around the many excellent options we now have for setting up, deploying and managing Rails apps on EC2 instances. Add this one to the list: ElasticRails - a collection of Capistrano libraries that reduce the process to: cap launch_instance, cap setup_server, and cap initial_install.
I’m a contributing blogger over at Rail Spikes, and my first post is about deploying Rails applications on Amazon’s EC2 service. Go check it out!
R2 says you should!
For fun, and because I wanted to learn something new this weekend, I moved Feedmarker and Snapballot over to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). They’ve been running happily over there for the last three days! Hopefully I’ll have time to write up my experiences making the move a little later; but for now let me just say that for a non-sysadmin like me, it was actually pretty easy. And now I’ve got a nice little EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that I can deploy with one click, should I ever need another server instance.
Hey, check out this interview I did with Peter Cooper of RubyInside:
“Rails allows me to develop and deploy a lot of ideas because it removes barriers from the path. Getting a simple idea to the point where it’s usable in Rails is a matter of hours, so there isn’t a lot of cost/risk in trying things out.”