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Plurk Solace Released

written by Armin Ronacher, on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 14:04.

Yesterday we released Solace under the BSD license free for everybody to use and modify. Solace is a multilingual support platform inspired by Stack Overflow.

That's the project I spend most of my time on the last three or four weeks and I'm very happy to share the results with out. If you're not yet familiar with the concept of Stack Overflow, think of it like a bulletin board where you can vote on topics and replies. The topics are the questions and the replies are possible answers. One can accept the best answer and that is automatically accepted as the correct one, unless someone comes and accepts a different reply as the answer. Like with Stack Overflow, Solace has a reputation system and gives you badges. The more reputation have have, the more features are available for you. For example over a specific threshold you are able to edit other people's posts, downvote others etc.

We do not have a demo version installed yet, but you can already install it on your local machine in less than a minute. Just download the tarball from the python package indes, unpack it and follow the instructions in the README file. It's distributed as a standard Python setuptools packaged application that you can run from a virtual env easily. (Note that there are problems with virtualenv on Snow Leopard at the moment, so google for solutions there or wait for virtualenv to get fixed.)

What does Solace do currently besides the very basic things?

  • Multi-lingual user interface. At the time of this writing only English and German are supported, but with the help of the community we should see many more languages soon.
  • The same instance can host multiple languages at once. The whole system from the ground up was developed with that in mind.
  • There is a RESTful API that allows you to query the database. Later we will also provide write access to it.
  • The badge system is in place and can be modified easily (currently by monkeypatching, but that will get a documented interface)
  • The Auth-system is pluggable. Integrate Solace with your own applications easily.
  • Replies and Answers are revisioned and a diff-view is provided.

Oh yes, and of course it's developed in Python as a standard WSGI application. If you like hacking on the code that should make things really easy :)

Grab it while it's hot and tell us what you think about it.

Tagged as: plurk, python, solace

Comments

  1. will it work on Google Appengine? are modifications needed?

    —  vivek on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 17:49 #

  2. Why?

    Isn't the community behind SO the point? I figure the software would be more of a commodity than the selling point

    —  Florian on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 17:50 #

  3. @1: It will not, currently it depends on a relational database. Of course we're accepting patches that would make a Appengine support possible, but that would require tests so that we do not break it in the future and a well crafted patch :)

    —  Armin Ronacher on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 19:05 #

  4. @2: That is the case. We're not trying to compete with Stack Overflow in any way. We just provide the application that tries to does what the stackoverflow/stackexchange software does as open source. If you want to create your own community for a specific topic (a board game, a support website etc.) you may want to evaluate Solace as an alternative to phpBB and/or a wiki.

    —  Armin Ronacher on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 19:20 #

  5. Why does it "only" support PostgreSQL, SQLite and MySQL, knowing that SQLAlchemy supports a wider variety of databases?

    —  Gonçalo on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 21:22 #

  6. It would probably support a wider range, but we will only test these three. Chances are high that something does not work with other databases.

    —  Armin Ronacher on Thursday, September 3, 2009 2:19 #

  7. This seems really interesting. I'll take a look I have been wanting a clone of SO for some time.

    @2 the point is SO is focused on programmers and in order to have other sites be focused on other groups you have to wait for them. Now you don't.

    —  Jorge Vargas on Thursday, September 3, 2009 2:48 #

  8. Thanks! I will try and work on a patch for AppEngine ... Btw, have you run any security tests and scalability tests on the software? any SO clone needs to scale and be very secure.

    Otherwise, this is just awesome work Armin! I was really waiting for someone to do this ... God answered ... with you as his angel :)

    —  Vivek on Thursday, September 3, 2009 3:17 #

  9. I can't thank you enough for releasing this.. got it up and running in a matter of minutes, great work man! :)

    —  Hao Wooi Lim on Thursday, September 3, 2009 13:23 #

  10. Awesome project. I'm very excited to dig into this...the code looks very clean to boot. Seems to be missing a few necessary features (search), but that's the beauty of having the source I suppose!

    —  cutter38 on Thursday, September 3, 2009 19:21 #

  11. Is there some way an admin can administrate users? I mean how do I delete a spammy user?

    —  Nitendo on Sunday, September 13, 2009 16:09 #

  12. Sorry If I come accross as 'naive' here, but isnt this pretty much what yahoo answers is?

    —  James on Monday, September 14, 2009 9:29 #

  13. I'm curious if you have instructions on getting this to run in production? I've been playing around with it and can get it to run locally without issue, but I'm unable to set the port to listen on. Any tips/instructions would be helpful. I'm using nginx as a proxy/load balancer. Perhaps it has something to do with running it in the virtual env?

    —  henry h on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 17:25 #

  14. Hey, Loved the implementation. Here are some quick first impressions:

    1. You should tell that the test users all have the password of "default" in the README
    1. For whatever reason, registering a new user did not work for me... probably a problem with the ability to send an email on my Ubuntu.
    1. Love to know how to run this behind apache. Should I use port forwarding?
    1. One of the best best features of Stack Overflow is its OpenID login system. There is just no reason to do user management in an application like this.
    1. It would be really cool if you could create a plurk site by importing all the questions and answers from Stack Overflow in a respectful way (i.e with appropriate back-links) in accordance with the content there. This way, you could "start" a community on Stack Overflow and then migrate it to a separate site.
    1. It does not look like you have a fancy editor yet. Why not use WMD just like SO.. its a good idea to generate clean meaningful html and that applies here... code.google.com/p/wmd-new/

    thanks. I do not have time to develop on this (I think in PHP) but I will be happy to test in the future...

    -FT

    —  Fred Trotter on Thursday, September 24, 2009 11:23 #

  15. Is there a demo site, to try out the functionality, before investing the time to install it?

    —  Joseph Turian on Sunday, February 7, 2010 21:42 #

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