Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Life project. The bulk of the code needed to run http://www.eol.org is written in Ruby on Rails and is made available to anyone for re-use, repurposing or for improvement. This is both an ambitious project and an ambitious codebase and we are excited to share it with the open source community. The code has been under development since approximately September 2007, but has undergone many revisions and updates from June 2008-December 2008. There is much work to be done, both in adding new features, and in the ongoing process of code refactoring and performance improvements. If you see something you like, share it with your colleagues and friends and reuse it in your own projects. If you see something you don't like, help us fix it or join the discussion at the Developers forum, or on GitHub.

The source code is available either on GitHub or via a read-only subversion repository.

Initial documentation in RDOC format is available as well.