[ANN] Kete 1.1, an open source Rails application for online communities, is here

[Walter McGinnis]

Kete 1.1 is now available with a giant helping of new features and improvements.  This is also the first release where you can grab Kete from our code repository's new home at Github.com.  See http://kete.net.nz/site/topics/show/25-downloads for details or browse the code online at http://github.com/kete/kete/.  For more information about this release, please see http://kete.net.nz/blog/topics/show/192-kete-11-is-here.

For those who haven't seen Kete in action, Kete is open source Ruby on Rails application that enables communities, whether the community is a town or a company, to collaboratively build their own digital libraries, archives and repositories. Kete combines features from Knowledge and Content Management Systems as well as collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, tags, and online forums to make it easy to add and relate content on a Kete site.

Examples of Kete 1.1. in use include the project's community site at http://kete.net.nz/ and Kete Horowhenua at http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/.

The full release announcement can be found at http://kete.net.nz/blog/topics/show/192-kete-11-is-here.

There are a number of stand alone Ruby on Rails plugins also available that were written for Kete.  Here are a few examples:

Acts As Licensed can be used to deliver user chosen licenses for the content they put up on a site.  A Rails app using the plugin can preload Creative Commons NZ or Creative Commons AU licenses with a rake task for their users to choose from or configure its own licenses via a web interface.  Feel free to contribute rake tasks for other jurisdictions.

Acts As Zoom can be used to add full text searching capabilities using the ruby-zoom gem to talk to a Z39.50 server.  Note that there are customizations in the bundled version of acts_as_zoom with Kete that will eventually be rolled back into the stand alone plugin.

Convert Attachment To will pull the text (within capabilities of relied upon utilities) from uploaded PDFs, HTML, MS Word docs, and Plain Text and populate a designated attribute with either HTML or text.

There is also a version of the TinyMCE plugin based on a much more recent version of TinyMCE's javascript than the original plugin.

More information about the plugins can be found at http://github.com/kete/.

Enjoy,

Walter McGinnis

Kete Project Lead (http://kete.net.nz)

Katipo Communications, Ltd.

http://katipo.co.nz/

[Mohit Sindhwani]

Walter McGinnis wrote:
> Kete 1.1 is now available with a giant helping of new features and
> improvements. This is also the first release where you can grab Kete
> from our code repository's new home at Github.com.
> See http://kete.net.nz/site/topics/show/25-downloads for details or
> browse the code online at http://github.com/kete/kete/. For more
> information about this release, please
> see http://kete.net.nz/blog/topics/show/192-kete-11-is-here.
>

This looks very interesting and very promising! I would like to try
this. I'm using Radiant CMS for a few things and feel that Kete seems
to offer a lot of compelling features for knowledge base portal development.

Cheers,
Mohit.
9/8/2008 | 2:44 PM.

[Walter McGinnis]

Hi Mohit,

You can give Kete a try simply by asking questions you might have on the Kete community site run on the software at http://kete.net.nz/ or feel free to contact me offlist and I can point you at a demo site where you can play around a bit.

Glad to hear your enthusiasm.  I considered using Radiant before starting the Kete project, but felt it was too CMS oriented for what I was going for.

Cheers,

Walter

[Mohit Sindhwani]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for the message. I am going to almost certainly try to install
and play with Kete in about a week or so. I'm developing a technical
community website (something like the PHP documents site) and this looks
quite exciting. Radiant was also a good start towards that, but I feel
(and this is baseless) that Kete + Radiant might be very very powerful!

Cheers,
Mohit.
9/10/2008 | 9:11 AM.