Ruby on Rails Forums in about 500 LOC: Beast
Posted by Daniel Butler Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:58:00 GMT

Josh Goebel and Rick Olsen are working on Beast, a “small, light-weight forum in Rails with a scary name and a goal of around 500 lines of code when we’re done.” Beast is not mature yet, but forums is one application domain that is sorely lacking in the RoR world, and it’s good to see people working on innovative applications. phpBB is difficult to maintain, modify, and full of security holes, and I’ve been searching for a better alternative, perhaps even going so far as to start writing my own forum system.
So far, RForum (stuck at version 0.2 since December 2005) looks like the most mature forum application available for Rails, and it comes complete with email gateway functionality, but hopefully other forum applications will start populating the thriving ecosystem.

