Open Source Social Networking for Ruby on Rails
Web 2.0 concepts and trends have led to different types of web applications. In general, the main targets are information sharing and collaboration. A typical example is social networks. Features include forums, blogging, file sharing, photo galleries, video galleries, and so on.
So it seems that users are happy with these features. But what about developers? Today, we will go through some open source solutions to help developers, especially Ruby on Rails developers, build their next social network applications.
El Dorado
El Dorado started as a simple discussion board that was somewhat modeled on the famouse PunBB and could even import data from any site running PunBB.
Current features are forums, group chat, event calendar, file sharing, random headers, avatars, css themes and privacy settings. Planned features include localization, blogging, photos, wiki, polls, link sharing and mobile messaging
Lovd By Less
Lovd By Less is a Rails application that supports most of the basic features you may need for a typical social network. Features include blogs with comments, photo galleries, following a user, user-to-user messaging, search for friends and showing recent activities of friends. In addition, it supports integration with Flickr and YouTube.
Insoshi
Insoshiwas developed by Michael Hartl, author of RailsSpace:
Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails, and includes the features built through the book.
Features include activity feeds, profiles with photos and comment walls, connections/friendships, discussion forums, blogs with comments, messaging, search for profiles, forums, and messages, and admin panel with site preferences.
Community Engine
Unlike Insoshi and Lovd By Less, Community Engine is a plugin that can add social networking features to existing Rails applications.
Features include user profiles, search, blogging (with tagging, categories and rich-text editing), photos uploading and tagging, bookmarking, comment notification by e-mail, forums, friendships and activity feeds, and favoriting bookmarks and blog posts.
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