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OpenACS for everyone

OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is:

• an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications.
• a robust, scalable framework (see: openacs-system) for building dynamic content driven sites and enterprise-level web applications.
• a collection of pre-built applications and services that you can build on to create a custom web-site or application.
• derived from the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). ArsDigita (now part of Red Hat, Inc.) kindly made their work available under the GPL, making all of this possible.

Through a modular architecture, OpenACS has packages for user/groups management, content management, e-commerce, news, FAQs, calendar, forums, bug tracking, wiki (XoWiki ), full-text searching etc. See OpenACS repository.

Strengths

• Ready "out of the box" for common features of collaborative web sites
• Proven Architecture. Components of the OpenACS (see openacs-system) are proving themselves in the most demanding of applications
• Designed for scalability See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability#Design_for_scalability
  
• Proven in the field. OpenACS is working well, deployed at sites that have upwards of 40K users (See: AIESEC and OpenACS sites)
• Responsive Community See: community-culture
• Commercial Support In addition to Commercial Support, there are many independent consultants available for hire. This collection of commercial providers work together to maintain OpenACS in addition to competing for clients. Sometimes vendors work together for the same client. Most importantly, no client is ever left without support, even if his or her original provider goes out of business.
• Documentation is continually evolving and improving. (See: Documentation_Project)
• Institutional commitment. Including MIT Sloan School of Management which has initiated and led the development of .LRN, an open-source courseware system built on OpenACS. (See Institutions supporting .LRN)
• Extensible See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible

Use the OpenACS fourms to contact the OpenACS community. We welcome your feedback and can help with your OpenACS endeavors. Commercial support is also available.

What others say about OpenACS

• ohloh.net valuates Open Source projects, and OpenACS' is here: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3877 and http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3877/analyses/latest along with an OpenACS thread elaborating on it.
• One users review of OpenACS, comparing it to LAMP, .NET, and the competition.
• What I saw at the revolution: .LRN/OpenACS meetings in Heidelberg, Germany 2004 by Cesar Brea
• FLOSS Usability report

Testimonials posted to forums on OpenACS

• How does OpenACS Scale?

Try OpenACS

History of OpenACS

See: History of OpenACS docs-history

Bibliography and Credits

See: Documentation Credits doc-credits