Earlier this summer, Bruno Bornsztein released the code behind his niché social-networking sites Curbly, Uncooped as an open-source project called: CommunityEngine.
CommunityEngine is a complete, white-label social network app wrapped up as a Ruby on Rails plugin making it easy to integrate forums, blogs, and user profiles into an existing web application or a stand-alone application. Like many weblog engines, the look and feel of each CommunityEngine can be completely customized.
“I envision somebody doing a theme that makes [CommunityEngine] act more like a social network, a theme that makes it act more like a blog, a theme that makes it act more like a group blog, or a newspaper. So you can pick and choose.” – Bruno Bornsztein
One of the first community contributions to the CommunityEngine code was l18n internationalization support, promptly encouraging a number of non-US-based CommunityEngine-based sites.
“The biggest benefit [to open-sourcing CommunityEngine] is making the code-base stronger…I can now launch a Curbly site in Spanish. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.” – Bruno Bornsztein
For more about CommunityEngine listen to my podcast conversation with Bruno.