Tune in : Why We Chose CommunityEngine for a Rails Social Network
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As previously announced, eSpace is currently developing a generic social network. Read the announcement here.
eSpace's Hatem Mahmoud blogs to tell us why eSpace chose CommunityEngine as a foundation.
When we first started working on developing a social network in Rails, I got together with my co-developer and we had decided from the start: instead of reinventing the wheel, we would check out the available solutions to choose one to build on. Here is why we chose CommunityEngine:
The main reason is that CommunityEngine offers a long list of features that are, by the way, not mentioned on their website!
Here is the list we discovered after installing it and checking the code:
- Authentication (sign up, activation, log in)
- Roles: admin, moderator, member
- Internationalization support
- Theme support
- User profiles, avatars
- Basic forums (Beast forums) with moderation and monitorship
- Friendships and activity feeds
- User search
- Blogs with categories and tagging
- Send post to friend
- Adding a poll to a post
- Social bookmarking links
- Photo uploading and tagging
- Invitations
- Events
- Contests
- Clippings - visual bookmarking
- Favoriting of clippings and blog posts
- Commenting on blogs, profiles, photos, and clippings
- Comment notification by e-mail
- Simple ad management
- Rich text editing
- Administration
- Statistics
Of course, we needed many other features but that was just a great start , and the good news is that CommunityEngine is a plugin that can be easily added to an existing application and can be updated when new updates are available. Also, it uses Rails Engines, making it easy to customize.
Of course there were some problems that we knew we were going to have to deal with, but more on those in future posts concerning the project.
Written By:
Written by:
Hatem Mahmoud (www.expressionlab.com)
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