MissingMethod

Here’s a new site I’m working on that helps tennis players connect and form hyper-local comunities:

TennisMetro.com

Unsurprisingly, it’s built on top of CommunityEngine, but with a lot of tennis-specific features added on. At the moment, it’s focused on tennis courts and players in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area (Minneapolis & St. Paul).

With TennisMetro, players can subscribe to their favorite local courts, and meet other people who play there. I’m an avid tennis player myself, and I was frustrated because I knew there were loads of good players at my local court, but I had no good way of connecting with them.

You’ll probably hear more from me on this next spring, when tennis season gears up again, but for now, check out the site and let me know if you have any feedback (esp. Twin Cities people).

Well, I wanted to learn how to write a Facebook application, so I though Teacherly’s wordsearch creator would be a fun one to port. Check out Wordsearchtastic! on Facebook; it runs on the same codebase as Teacherly (using CommunityEngine, of course, was a cinch).

Wordsearchtastic makes it fun and easy to create wordsearch puzzles on Facebook, share them with your friends and see who can finish them fastest. Enjoy!

I’m happy to introduce a tool that makes installing and deploying CommunityEngine much easier. It’s called CommunityEngine-Setup:

http://github.com/bborn/communityengine-setup/tree/master

Along with the new CommunityEngineServer Amazon EC2 ami I’m making available (ami-cbc226a2), CommunityEngine-setup makes it super easy to get started using CE.

The CommunityEngineServer ami is a server image with all the CE requirements baked in (including rmagick, which always seems to be a pain to install). Then, you can use CE-Setup to get a fully functioning CE application installed on your server, complete with a git repository and working deploy scripts.

Enjoy! (And remember, this is an early release, so please let me know if you find bugs)

Just another example of how fast and flexible CommunityEngine is: www.weebabystuff.com took under 16 hours to build, from “rails weebabystuff” to “cap deploy”.

The site is a group blog/community focused on baby products, accessories and DIY projects.

Using CommunityEngine is a huge short-cut, and makes the cost of launching a new site minimal. And since it’s a plugin, not a self-contained application like Insoshi or Lovdbyless, I don’t have to wory about keeping my customized social network synced with the main repository; my local changes are isolated from the core code, so getting the newest version of CE into my app is as easy as “git pull”.

Thanks to some great contributions from the CE developer community, CommunityEngine now has full support for internationalization. We even have a good portion of the interface translated into (admittedly poor) Spanish.

This means all you non-English speakers around the world can use CommunityEngine to build awesome community sites in your own language!

This release is tagged v0.10.5 and you can find it here: http://github.com/bborn/communityengine/tree/v0.10.5.

If you’re interested in helping us translate the application into another language, please let us know! Drop us a line at Google Groups discussion list.

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.