Hey everyone,

I’m pleased to announced a new BIG release of Shapado (the free/libre open source stackoverflow stackexchange on steroids). We’ve added tons of new features and hopefully didn’t add too much bugs.

The new features are:

• reputation constrains: you will need a certain amount of reputation points in order do some actions such as voting up or down and more.

• badges: people who participate a lot or are just getting started will get rewarded with these :)

• new ui: shapado should look better now

• theming: if you still don’t like how it looks, you can now make your group look however you want, the default install comes with 5 default them but you’re free to create your own ones. Themes are based on web apps .

• customization:
  • custom ads: your group can have its own ads (adbard and adsense only for now)
  • custom domains for groups: instead of having foobar.shapado.com, you can have foobar.com (eg: http://www.koreacrowd.com)
  • custom analytics: you can use your own google analytics code, or anything else

• improved search: you can now search by tags, and search key words are highlighted in results

• drafts: you can create a question while logged out, then login and your question will still be there.

• i18n: translated to portuguese (thanks to fr33mind)

• groups: groups can be made private, public and/or isolated

• improvements on voting system: you can now change your vote

• favorites: you can bookmark your favorite questions

• watchers: you can watch a question and receive email notifications when new answer are posted (you can use feeds for that too).

• code highlighting: if you post some code, it will be highlighted automatically

• wiki features: posts can be edited and rolled back, the history of each post can be viewed

• auto links: if you post a link to youtube, vimeo, blip.tv or more, it will show automatically as thumbnail (not flash! we don’t want to slow your browser), when you click on the thumbnail, the flash player will show up.

• more commentting: it’s now possible to comment on questions too

• widgets: shapado comes with several widgets that are displayed in the side bar. They give information such as the most recent groups and users. There’s UI to configure their placement on the page.

• timezones: questions creation date show up in your timezone.

• related questions: show questions related to the current one in the side bar

• a RESTful API: you can create and get question and answers using HTTP and JSON.

• track experts by tag: shapado automatically detects people that are experts in some fields. That is to say, if you answer a question about “kde” or “ruby” and get some upvotes, shapado will notice it. Then, if a question gets asked about “kde” or “ruby”, shapado will notify you so you can help people faster (the notification is opt-in).

The goal is to turn shapado into a big IA machine that will know who knows about what so that when you ask a question, it will redirect the question to people who know about it. This is just the first step, we will bring this to the next level with our next version to be dubbed “skynet” ;)

As usual, get the source here

One more thing: We’ve been told that Shapado is being used internally at AT&T, they already have their own repo and are contributing patches !

Big thanks to:

• Ian for his financial support and trust in us. (group)
• Andrés Felipe Vargas for his support and contributions (group)
• Carlos Pais for the Portuguese translation
• Jason Heiss for his patches and bringing Shapado to AT&T Interactive

Posted on 2010-01-13 17:49:21 UTC

14 comments

Tags shapado, foss, ruby, mongodb, rails, mongomapper, release