23 Amazing And Open Source Ruby On Rails Applications

Umut M. — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:12:43 +0000

Ruby on Rails is a powerful web framework that helps creating web applications easier, faster & writing an organized code.

There are lots of websites that use it including popular ones like Twitter, Basecamp, AboutUs & many more.

Also, Ruby on Rails powers some amazing open source web applications which you may want to use directly or improve further.

Here is a well-categorized 23 open source Ruby on Rails applications:

(Note: There are few Merb apps. in the list too which we believe is ok considering Rails & Merb are getting into the same package with Rails 3.)

Project, Task & Time Management

Notes

Notes is an easy to use to-do-list & notes manager application.

It is possible to create pages & make them public (if wanted) or create simple notes. With the Jabber listener support, you can eevn add new notes from your Google Talk by chatting with a bot.

Reminders can be set for each note that can be sent to you by e-mail or SMS (via a Twitter bridge).

Tracks

A to-do-list manager with a clean interface. Tracks lets you to categorize, prioritize, schedule & star items for a better usability (see WRD post).

Interface is Ajaxed & many tasks are done by drag'n drops. The application has multi-user support & comes with a built-in web-server for user who want to install it to their computers.

ClockingIT

It allows keeping track of all your tasks and the time you spend on them. With just a click, the timer can be started (see WRD post).

But not only that. There is a built-in project management system with milestones, reports & tasks.

ClockingIT tracks/logs every change to the documents & can send notifications via e-mail, RSS or iCal.

It is normally a free hosted application & source can be found here.

RubyTime

RubyTime, which is built with Merb, is an application to manage projects in means of project files, time spent & invoicing.

Using RubyTime:

users can bill projects
clients can log in and see all the data for only their projects
project managers can run reports and invoices for any project.

Redmine

Redmine is a flexible project management application that has an integrated news, files, documents management & more (see WRD post).

It supports multiple projects & makes it possible to have per-project forums/wikis.

Every step can be set to send notifications via e-mail or RSS. Also, it is possible to create issues via e-mail.

The application is cross-database & multilingual.

CMS & Blogging

Radiant CMS

A simple-yet-powerful Ruby on Rails CMS application with a slick interface (see WRD post).

It uses 3 main menus to manage the whole content:

pages: for creating the hierarchy & content
snippets: like PHP includes or modules to improve the pages
layouts: pre-designed themes that decide how pages will be displayed

Radiant also has a template language, named Radius, for şncluding dynamic content to any page.

typo

A Ruby on Rails blogging application that is developed continiously.

It comes with theming & plugins support for easier customization. Every part is planned for a better SEO, like friendly-URLs, ability to add keywords/description to every category/page & more.

Project is hosted on GitHub.

Mephisto

A widely used blogging engine that has ready-to-use plug-ins..

It uses Liquid templates for creating & editing themes. Mephisto also has a built-in caching system for faster loading.

XLsuite CRM | CMS

A full-package application that provides a CRM and ERP system.

It has amazing features like:

Contact list management with import/export capabilities
Integrated webmail, newsletter management & forum for a better communication
Ability to present & sell products/subscriptions (including controlling the inventory & payments)
Managing the content of a website with multi-domain, RSS & permission based user/ group system

The application is still under development but can be downloaded.

Image Galleries

Albumdy

Albumdy enables you to create a multi-user image gallery system where images can be uploaded, edited & shared.

The application uses many other popular resources like: Blueprint CSS for the layout & SWFUpload for managing multiple uploads. Images in a gallery are presented with Galleria & they are stored in Amazon S3.

Gullery

A simple but functional photo gallery built with Ruby on Rails.

It uses the lightweight mini_magick to resize photos, reducing the memory requirements of the full RMagick suite.

Photos can be sorted by drag'n drops, captions can be edited easily & the look/feel can be customized via CSS.

E-Commerce

Spree

Spree is a highly extensible & customizable e-commerce application. Developers can easily override existing views, provide new ones or provide additional models, migrations and controllers.

All popular payment gateways are supported as Active Merchant is used.

Substruct

A simple & production ready Ruby on Rails e-commerce system.

It supports PayPal & Authorize.Net as the payment gateways. From the admin interface, you can easily track the inventory, view sales reports, create static content or answer the questions of your customers.

EcomPages

EcomPages is an e-commerce application which has most of the basic features of an e-store.

It has a good looking admin interface that makes managing products & orders easier.

The application is still being developed & is not feature-rich but can be a good base to start with & improve further.

Social Networks & Communities

EchoWaves

This is a group chat social network application. You can start conversations and connect wih other users while discussing it.

It is possible to make a conversation read-only for presenting a content too.

Community Engine

A plugin for Ruby on Rails applications for having the features of a social netwoking website instantly.

Some great features include:

Authentication (sign up, log in), user search & user profiles
Blogs with tagging, categories and rich text editing
Photo uploading and tagging
Commenting, forums, friendship, activity feeds & more

Insoshi

An open source social networking application with nice feaures (although it is under active development).

Users can have profiles with photos and comment walls, see activity feeds, friend to each other, have blogs, create discussions or send messages & more.

Openmind

Openmind enables you to create a collaborative environment for collecting the thoughts of your customers/collagues on a product/service.

User can discuss online about an idea & vote for the features. Admin can mark the most-requested features as "to be included in next releases" & users get informed from this. A nice application for creating a constructive community.

Forulio

Forulio is a Ruby on Rails forum application with a similar approach to popular forum softwares like phpBB or vBulletin.

It supports sub-forums, has a monitoring page for viewing the activity and has tagging integrated.

Other

Panda

Panda is an open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming.

By providing an elegant REST API, the whole process works painless and you can add video functionality to your web application in a matter of hours.

The application runs with Amazon Web Services utilising EC2, S3 and SimpleDB. And, it provides an admin panel for managing videos.

Mailr

Mailr is an open source webmail application that can be used with any IMAP server.

E-mails can be created both in HTML & plain text. E-mail addresses in the contact list are Ajax-auto-completed just like Gmail & more.

Warehouse

This is a beautiful web-based subversion browser built with Ruby on Rails.

Multiple repositories can be managed from the same interface. Also, it is possible to add any number of users with different permissions.

RubyURL

RubyURL is an online tool for converting long website addresses into short ones.

Besides the standard form input, it is possible to create short URLs via the REST API which supports both JSON & XML requests. Source of the application can be found here.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Open Source Video Platform: Panda

Umut M. — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:01:25 +0000

Advertise here with BSA

Update: A more recent review of the service can be found here.

Panda is an open source solution that handles uploading, encoding & streaming videos.

All the process is completed via an elegant REST API.

Panda is designed to run in the cloud using Amazon's array of web services.

The application runs on a customised EC2 instance with everything pre-installed, including FFmpeg and an plethora of codecs.

SimpleDB is used to store all of data for video, encoding, accounts and encoding profiles. Uploaded and encoded video files are then stored on S3.

Other features of Panda:

Everything contained within one elegant Merb application.
Support for FLV, h264 for Flash, iPhone formats & more.
Panda gem for painless integration with Ruby on Rails and Merb.
Lovely little admin dashboard for managing your videos.

By default, Panda uses the JW FLV player but you can switch to any other video player easily.