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:

  1. Authentication (sign up, activation, log in)
  2. Roles: admin, moderator, member
  3. Internationalization support
  4. Theme support
  5. User profiles, avatars
  6. Basic forums (Beast forums) with moderation and monitorship
  7. Friendships and activity feeds
  8. User search
  9. Blogs with categories and tagging
  10. Send post to friend
  11. Adding a poll to a post
  12. Social bookmarking links
  13. Photo uploading and tagging
  14. Invitations
  15. Events
  16. Contests
  17. Clippings - visual bookmarking
  18. Favoriting of clippings and blog posts
  19. Commenting on blogs, profiles, photos, and clippings
  20. Comment notification by e-mail
  21. Simple ad management
  22. Rich text editing
  23. Administration
  24. 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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