We Chose CommunityEngine for a Rails Social Network
Last week, I and Mosta were about to start a new project at eSpace, a social network in Rails. And instead of reinventing the wheel, we decided to check the available solutions to choose one to build on. Here is why we chose CommunityEngine.
The main reason is that CommunityEngine offers a huge 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.
On the other hand, currently we are trying to resolve some issues:
- Upgrading to Rails 2.1.1, as both CommunityEngine and Rails Engines didn't upgraded it. We are on Rails 2.1.0 now.
- Supporting PostgreSQL, as we got some errors with some queries when we tried to run on it.
- Little test errors on Windows machines!
Later, hopefully :-), we may talk about how to handle these issues.
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