20 Jan 2003 boog   » (Journeyer)

Believe it or not, the day is coming. I will be releasing my first major open source project! What is it? A community posting and discussion system. But this is no regular PHPBB or forum...

It's called FreeFilter. You might be aware of a popular community site called MetaFilter which gets a lot of good press because the interface is simple, not over technical, and let's people get on with the talking and posting, and not the administration.

FreeFilter is already running at http://freefilter.bigbold.com/ and you can sign up, post, or either post as 'Anonymous Coward' if you don't want to join.

Initial testing has been going really well, and I'm looking forward to using this for a few community sites I have dreamed up. Hopefully other people will have even better ideas.

The code is written in Perl using MySQL as the backend. Has a generic template SQL file to import to get the database in order, and is really quick to set up. 99% of the layout is controllable from the database and CSS files.

Haven't done any high traffic testing yet (although if I launch a good community hopefully it'll get some!) but am serving a few hundred pageviews per day so far without problems.

There are 101 things to do, things to be added, and lots of tidy up, but it's working so I thought I'd get it up ASAP. The source code will follow when I reach a 0.1 version stage in the next week or two. The code needs a bit of cleaning up.

Anyway, if you have comments, do let me know!

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