Communit.as is a web application that provides a foundation for building custom community and social network sites.

There are certain core features any community or social network site needs: user accounts, access control, database abstraction, template rendering and a few other essentials. While you could certainly build these things from scratch every time you build a site, this seems like kind of a waste of effort to us. With that in mind we set out to create a reusable, upgradeable foundation that can shave the first few weeks of development off of any custom community site.

"Custom" is really the operative word there. Communit.as is generally intended for building sites with lots of custom functionality. Instead starting with the functionality we think you want and forcing you to hack the crap out of it, we take care of the tedious stuff and give you a great set of tools for adding your own features. If you want a generic blog or a social network that does everything out of the box, there are better solutions for those things.

This isn't to say you don't get a running application out of the box. You do. We provide a simple and robust installer that will have you up and running in minutes.

Features

• User accounts
• Action-level access control
• Modularized MVC-based application design
• An easy-to-use custom theme system based on Smarty
• Easy access to all the features of the Zend Framework
• A rich and easy to use plugin API, patterned after Wordpress
• Regular releases with new features and bug fixes
• Great documentation
• Commercial support and training are available

Technologies

Communit.as is built in PHP 5 and uses the Zend Framework, the Smarty Template Engine and the Asido Image Processing library. While we aim to be database agnostic, we currently only support MySQL 5.