Love any rails forum software? Want to collaborate?

[Keith Schacht]

Does anyone have any rails forum software that they love? If not,
does anyone need a solid rails forum for their business and want to
collaborate on making one really good?

I've used the original Beast last year back and was unimpressed. As a
long-time user of phpBB and vBulletin, I'm really looking for a
robust, full-featured forum, that is well architected so I can extend
it for my needs.

I collected a list of about a dozen rails forum packages:

El Dorado, Beast, Altered Beast, Ultimate Beast, Savage Beast,
merbums, rforum, fringe_forum, wicked, fora, murito, fu2, simple-
forum, RBoard, opinionated-forum

I have not looked through them all yet. 50% of my challenge is
reviewing these and picking the right one to start with, but the other
50% is picking one that I know a few other companies are attached to
as well.

Whatever we pick we're going to be stuck with for awhile. We're going
to start improving on it for our own needs and contributing back and
it would really be nice to have a handful of other companies also
attached to it as well so we're collectively improving one rather than
dividing our efforts.

Keith

[Trevor Turk]

Hi Keith,

I'm the developer of El Dorado, which is inspired by PunBB (a PHP
forum). I moved over from PHP to Ruby/Rails a while back, and my
"learn by doing" project was to recreate the core functionality of
PunBB in El Dorado. I learned a lot from Beast, which is a nice app. I
think it's been replaced by Altered Beast now, which might be worth
checking out.

I'm using El Dorado for a couple of private sites with my friends and
whatnot, so it's actively being used, and I've been doing an OK job of
maintaining it. A couple of people have chipped in (a German guy is
almost done with a localization project), but I'd love to have some
more contributors. The problem is that the app does pretty much
everything I want and more, so my incentive for improving it is... not
great :) I've been thinking of breaking it apart into engines, but I'm
not sure if waiting until Rails 3 (with supposedly fully-mountable
apps) comes along. Maybe after RailsConf I'll have a better idea.

You can check out EL Dorado in more detail here:

http://almosteffortless.com/eldorado/

Let me know if you have any questions. There's a demo/support/testing
site that I check pretty much every day:

http://eldoradoapp.com/

- Trevor

[Trevor Turk]

On Apr 6, 9:14 pm, Keith Schacht <krscha...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I collected a list of about a dozen rails forum packages:
> El Dorado, Beast, Altered Beast, Ultimate Beast, Savage Beast,
> merbums, rforum, fringe_forum, wicked, fora, murito, fu2, simple-
> forum, RBoard, opinionated-forum

You should also check out:

http://github.com/svenfuchs/adva_cms/tree/interface

I haven't dived in too deep, but it seems like they're doing very good
work, and they have an excellent team going.

- Trevor

[Keith Schacht]

Trevor,

I only know about El Dorado because you and I emailed awhile back. :)
It was when I was looking for a rails programming and you had recently
joined LifeSnapz.

But anyway, I do like El Dorado. It does a lot more than just a forum,
where in my case a forum is all I need, but I definitely need to look
at it more closely. One of these days I need to sit down and evaluate
the dozen or so that I found and see which one is closest to what I
want. I was really hoping to find a couple "partners in crime" that
want to pool efforts on this. Do you know if LifeSnapz is planning on
implementing a forum in the near future because they may be in the
same boat?

Thanks for the tip on adva! I just checked it out and the forum
appears to be one of the least developed part of their system, but it
looks promising. I love that they're taking the "engines" approach
from the very beginning. Even if they have to redo that with Rails 3,
architecturally I bet they've done a lot of the hard work.

Keith

[Trevor Turk]

On Apr 9, 12:20 am, Keith Schacht <krscha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was really hoping to find a couple "partners in crime" that
> want to pool efforts on this. Do you know if LifeSnapz is planning on
> implementing a forum in the near future because they may be in the
> same boat?

I'm not sure what you're looking to partner in, but if it's in
improving the El Dorado forum, I'm in. Like I said, I'd like to split
the app into multiple parts, because the forum is really the main
point of interest for me. I don't think we're planning on doing
anything with it at work, but we've talked about implementing some
sort of lightweight forum - it might just be a new in-house project,
I'm not sure.

Anyway, let me know if/when you decide which direction to go. It'll be
interesting to know what you choose to use and why.

Thanks,
- Trevor

[Keith Schacht]

Trevor,

Definitely, I'll let you know. We're moving a little slow on our end
so it will likely be a couple months before we really sit down and
start to focus on the forum part, but I knew it would take me a little
while to review the options so I'm starting early.

I really like that you're excited to help improve El Dorado. What I
meant by partner was to find another company in a similar position to
us that wants to use it. Having more companies besides just us
depending on a system is the best "insurance" that there will be
multiple sets of eyeballs focused on improving and fixing the code.
Not that you won't be, but it's even better if it's some other
companies.

BTW, do you know of any high traffic implementations of the El Dorado
forum?

Keith

[Trevor Turk]

On Apr 12, 9:27 pm, Keith Schacht <krscha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Having more companies besides just us
> depending on a system is the best "insurance" that there will be
> multiple sets of eyeballs focused on improving and fixing the code.

Yeah, I can dig it. I think you might want to look more at Beast,
which 37signals uses. Maybe adva_cms will have more adoption in the
future as well. I'm not sure, though.

> BTW, do you know of any high traffic implementations of the El Dorado
> forum?

Not that I know of, at least. I think the largest install I've been
told about is here:

http://theeestory.com/

- Trevor