I wan’t to introduce a small side project of me today that we needed for ownCloud but could be useful for other too. It’s call CONTRIBOOK and I planed to do this for many years. Lately I was sitting in planes and trains a lot so I have some time to finally do the version 1.0 It’s a tool that can be used for community building and showing community activity as we wanted to do on ownCloud.org but it’s very generic and can be used by other open source projects tool.

Many years ago when we rebranded KDE from KDE the software to KDE the community the question came up how this should be reflected on the KDE.org website. It was clear that we should show the KDE community on the website in parallel to the software that we do. So I hacked together a few PHP scripts that show the latest blog posts, the latest forum posts and the latest applications on the homepage. This was always planed as a first step but somehow I never found the time to improve it.
Today at ownCloud we are facing the same problem. We want to show the activity of our awesome community on the homepage and invite new contributors but this is not very easy. We are even struggling with our ownCloud blog planet on the homepage. We used a WordPress plugin for that but we had to shut it down because of serious bugs that are not fixed by upstream.
We could just install one of the existing planet software modules that are used by other free software communities but I always found the functionality very limited and I wanted to do something more.

So today I want to announce 1.0 of CONTRIBOOK. It is only the first version but it can already do a lot. I hope that a lot of people use it and contribute to it. It is a tool that can be used for community building. It replaces a normal planet software and adds a few tweaks like responsive design and endless scrolling. But it does a lot more. It collects all kinds of social media information like Twitter posts, Blog posts, forum posts, github commits, RSS feeds and more and shows them in a nice way. You can have a nice feed with the latest activities of your community on a page like the homepage for example. A list of the latest commits, bugs or twitter posts or content entries from an OCS server. Every user can have a profile page with a nice description, a photo, links to other sites with more information and also the latest activities like blog posts, commits and so on.
All the user data is stored in a database. So to add or edit user accounts you have to change it in the database. In the future a user should be able to keep the own information up to date with an html form. This is planed for the next version.

We currently used it on ownCloud.org for the planet page to show the blog posts with nice endless scrolling (http://owncloud.org/news), the contacts page for a list of core contributors and links to profile pages (http://owncloud.org/about/contact), the new apps page (http://owncloud.org/about/apps/) and the homepage (http://owncloud.org) I plan to extend it with more features over time but I also hope that other contribute and that it will be used by other free software projects like KDE or GNOME too.
It’s AGPL licensed and lives here: https://github.com/contribook

Feedback, help and pull requests are very welcome.

Frank