CommunityEngine [v1.9.9]

Information at: http://www.communityengine.org

Requirements:

- RAILS VERSION 3.1.0beta (lower versions are not supported)
- All the gems listed in the Gemfile

Getting CommunityEngine Running

1. Copy the following into your Gemfile:

    gem 'rails', '3.1.0.beta', :git => 'git://github.com/bborn/rails.git'
    gem 'rack', :git => 'git://github.com/rack/rack.git'
    gem 'arel',  :git => 'git://github.com/rails/arel.git'
    gem 'community_engine', '1.9.9', :git => 'git://github.com/bborn/communityengine.git', :branch => "rails3"
    gem "meta_search", :git => 'git://github.com/bborn/meta_search.git', :branch => 'rails3.1'
    gem 'authlogic', :git => 'git://github.com/bborn/authlogic.git'
    gem 'calendar_date_select', :git => 'http://github.com/paneq/calendar_date_select.git', :branch => 'rails3test'		
    gem 'configatron'
    gem 'hpricot'
    gem 'htmlentities'
    gem 'haml'
    gem 'ri_cal'
    gem 'rakismet'
    gem 'aws-s3', :require => 'aws/s3'
    gem "will_paginate", "~> 3.0.pre2"
    gem "dynamic_form"
    gem "friendly_id", "~> 3.2.1"
    gem "paperclip", "~> 2.3"
    gem 'acts_as_commentable', "~> 3.0.0"
    gem "recaptcha", :require => "recaptcha/rails"
   

2. From your app's root directory run:

    $ bundle install
    $ rake community_engine:install
    $ rake db:migrate
   

3. Add a file called application.yml to your config directory. In it put (at least):

    community_name: Your Application Name
   

4. Mount CommunityEngine in your config/routes.rb file:

    mount CommunityEngine::Engine => "/"
   

5. Delete the default views/layouts/application.html.erb that Rails created for you. Delete public/index.html if you haven't already.

6. Start your server!

    $ rails server
   

Optional Configuration

To override the default configuration, create an application.yml file in Rails.root/config

The application configuration defined in this file overrides the one defined in the CommunityEngine gem

This is where you can change commonly used configuration variables, like configatron.community_name, etc.

Photo Uploading

By default CommunityEngine uses the filesystem to store photos.

To use Amazon S3 as the backend for your file uploads, you'll need the aws-s3 gem installed, and you'll need to add a file called amazon_s3.yml to the application's root config directory (examples are in /community_engine/sample_files).

You'll need to change your configuration in your application.yml to tell CommunityEngine to use s3 as the photo backend.

Finally, you'll need an S3 account for S3 photo uploading.

Create an s3.yml file in Rails.root/config

Roles

CommunityEngine Users have a Role (by default, it's admin, moderator, or member)

Once logged in as an admin, you'll be able to toggle other users between moderator and member (just go to their profile page and look on the sidebar.)

Admins and moderators can edit and delete other users posts.

There is a rake task to make an existing user into an admin:

rake community_engine:make_admin email=user@foo.com 

(Pass in the e-mail of the user you'd like to make an admin)

Themes

To create a theme:

1. Add a 'themes' directory in Rails.root with the following structure:

    /Rails.root
      /themes
        /your_theme_name
          /views
          /images
          /stylesheets
          /javascripts
   

2. Add theme: your_theme_name to your application.yml (you'll have to restart your server after doing this)

3. Customize your theme. For example: you can create a /Rails.root/theme/your_theme_name/views/shared/_scripts_and_styles.html.haml to override the default one, and pull in your theme's styleshees.

   To get at the stylesheets (or images, or javascripts) from your theme, just add /theme/ when referencing the resource, for example:

    = stylesheet_link_tag 'theme/screen'  # this will reference the screen.css stylesheet within the selected theme's stylesheets directory.
   

Note: when running in production mode, theme assets (images, js, and stylesheets) are automatically copied to you public directory (avoiding a Rails request on each image load).

Localization

Localization is done via Rails native I18n API. We've added some extensions to String and Symbol to let them respond to the .l method. That allows for a look up of the symbol (or a symbolized version of the string).

For complex strings with substitutions, Symbols respond to the .l method with a hash passed as an argument, for example:

:welcome.l :name => current_user.name

And in your language file you'd have:

welcome: "Welcome {{name}}"

To customize the language, or add a new language create a new yaml file in Rails.root/config/locales. The name of the file should be LANG-LOCALE.yml (e.g. en-US.yml or es-PR). The language only file (es.yml) will support all locales.

Spam Control

Spam sucks. Most likely, you'll need to implement some custom solution to control spam on your site, but CE offers a few tools to help with the basics.

ReCaptcha: to allow non-logged-in commenting and use ReCaptcha to ensure robots aren't submitting comments to your site, just add the following lines to your application.yml:

allow_anonymous_commenting: true
recaptcha_pub_key: YOUR_PUBLIC_KEY
recaptcha_priv_key: YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY

You can also require ReCaptcha on signup (to prevent automated signups) by adding this in your application.yml (you'll still need to add your ReCaptcha keys):

require_captcha_on_signup: true

Akismet: Unfortunately, bots aren't the only ones submitting spam; humans do it too. Akismet is a great collaborative spam filter from the makers of Wordpress, and you can use it to check for spam comments by adding one line to your application.yml:

akismet_key: YOUR_KEY

Other notes

Any views you create in your app directory will override those in CommunityEngine For example, you could create Rails.root/app/views/layouts/application.html.haml and have that include your own stylesheets, etc.

You can also override CommunityEngine's controllers by creating identically-named controllers in your application's app/controllers directory.

Contributors - Thanks! :)

• Bryan Kearney - localization
• Alex Nesbitt - forgot password bugs
• Alejandro Raiczyk - Spanish localization
• Fritz Thielemann - German localization, il8n
• Oleg Ivanov - acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
• David Fugere - French localization
• Barry Paul - routes refactoring
• Andrei Erdoss localization
• Errol Siegel simple private messages integration, documentation help
• Carl Fyffe - documentation, misc.
• Juan de Frías static pages, photo albums, message_controller tests
• Joel Nimety authlogic authentication
• Stephane Decleire i18n, fr-FR locale

Bug tracking is via GitHub Issues