OpenACS for everyone

OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is:

• an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications.
• a robust, scalable framework (see: en: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. See en:feature-summary
• Proven Architecture. Components of the OpenACS (see en: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 e.g. AIESEC at OpenACS sites)
• Responsive Community See: en: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: en: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, http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2004/04/what_i_saw_at_t.html#more, 2004 by Cesar Brea
• FLOSS Usability sprint
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS for building killer apps
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS smorgasbord app framework over meal-in-a-box apps
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS in spite of imperfect documentation
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS though its missing generic features
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS when learning other ways seems so easy
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS app framework library
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS when other frameworks measure much faster
• Why a reluctant coder chooses “trashy looking” and “hard to use” OpenACS

Others' descriptions of OpenACS

• http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/cms-matrix/openacs
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenACS
• http://www.cmsreview.com/timelines/ShopComparison.html?SelectedList=Product20;

Testimonials posted to forums on OpenACS

• OpenACS #1 for high traffic websites (Aug 2013 sample)
• One week after switching to naviserver from aolserver on openacs.org (Aug 2013)
• How does OpenACS Scale?

Try OpenACS

History of OpenACS

See: History of OpenACS en:docs-history

Bibliography and Credits

See: Documentation Credits en:doc-credits