Cahoots! News

We've release v1.3.1 of Cahoots on SourceForge; this will be the last revision for the v1.x family.

We're currently re-initializing SVN with the under-development v2 source code. v2 is about 95% complete (although not thoroughly tested), and we anticipate a mid-November beta. v2 is build on the Zend Framework, and offers a much more modular, extensible, and customizable structure than v1. It also offers tons of great new features and integration points, with plenty of room for more as we continue development.... read more

We're pleased to announce the availability of Cahoots v1.3, the newest version of our PHP-based, open source community-building software. With many new features to help communities share different types of knowledge and information, Cahoots is a democratically-controlled platform that focuses on the retention and presentation of knowledge.

SourceForge is moving stuff around - our Wiki, with all the documentation for Cahoots, is now at https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cahoots/index.php?title=Main_Page.

The v1.1.1 release of Cahoots offers bugfixes and some minor functionality tweaks; it's still one of the best ways to build a Q&A based community that offers social networking and discussion features. Similar in base form to ServerFault.com and StackOverflow.com, Cahoots expands to include blogging, podcasting, and much more. It's now much more customizable, too, making it easier to build the exact community site you want.

Cahoots!, the community software that includes Q&A, blogging, podcasting, wiki functionality, and more, is now in v1.1. Adding more than three dozen major new features, along with tweaks and bugfixes, Cahoots! is a better choice than ever for quickly creating an effective online community. Written in PHP 5.2.x and MySQL 5.x, Cahoots! works on nearly any Web server and with nearly any Web browser, and is the result of significant study on how technical users prefer to interact with Web-based communities. Best yet, Cahoots! incorporates aspects of online social networks, such as "following" and more, and offers numerous options for RSS syndication, e-mail alerts, and more. Cahoots! is under active development, with the v1.2 feature set already in planning. Visit sourceforge.net/projects/cahoots to download and read more, or cahoots.concentratedtech.com for our demo site.

Cahoots! is a social-enabled, online community-building platform written in PHP and MySQL, and designed for easy deployment on nearly any modern Web server. It helps quickly create structured communities that leverage the behaviors that community members already exhibit, helping make communities more effective more quickly.

In preparation for our v1.1 release, we've updated the site's project pages at SourceForge.net/projects/cahoots, providing new screen shots, a complete list of what's new in v1.1 (more than 30 major new features), and more. We've expanded the Wiki-based documentation (also on SourceForge), too. ... read more

Our v1.1 release is now at 'release candidate' stage, meaning we are feature-complete and working off the last bugs - and appreciate hearing about any bugs we may have missed. We've added more than 30 major new features, including group discussions, numerous user-assistance features, and much, much more. Download at our SourceForge project page.

Cahoots! is a unique, PHP-based platform for developing community Web sites. Eschewing many "traditional" Web site elements, the site was developed after long study of how technology professionals interact with each other and preserve information over time. The site is based around a Q&A section, but also offers integrated blogging, podcasting, collaborative editing, and much more - all designed to preserve knowledge and make it easier to find. Cahoots integrates many social networking features, including the ability to "follow" content authors, integrate with Twitter, and much more. v1.0 is the first production-stable release, which is now in use at TheExpertsCommunity.com, Cahoots.ConcentratedTech.com (the software's demo site), and others. v1.1 development is already underway!

We've posted an RC1 of our Cahoots! software. At this point, we've gotten (we hope) everything we wanted in v1.0 in there and working; now, we're looking for last-minute bugs and particularly making sure this will run on a variety of systems. We've made some major changes to support shared hosting environments (esp Linux) where PHP is getting strange path mapping; we now have a demo site running at cahoots.concentratedtech.com which is a shared-Linux environment. We've also gotten it working on IIS, so hopefully we've covered bases. We're going to leave this in RC1 status for a couple of months to gather feedback; questions can be posted to cahoots.concentratedtech.com (although for things we identify as a bug or a suggestion we may ask you to escalate your question to the appropriate tracking system for action).

The "test.concentratedtech.com" URL is being removed effective immediately; that site will be going live as a production site, TheExpertsCommunity.com, for Quest Software.

We're in the process of standing up an evaluation site at cahoots.concentratedtech.com; we ran into an interesting problem with GoDaddy hosting that we're working out. We're actually glad to have run into this, since it's giving us an opportunity to deal with a problem that, we expect, many shared-host folks will run into. We appreciate your patience while we get the site up.

The Cahoots community-building software is now at its v0.3 release, meaning we're feature-complete for v1.0 and performing full integration testing across the software. A test site is up at http://test.concentratedtech.com, and will be a "live test" through mid-February - after which it will become a complete production site.

For anyone previewing the software, we still encourage you to grab a HEAD from Subversion rather than the v0.3 release - we're checking in fixes and tweaks several times each day.

v0.2 is our official beta release - we're feature complete for this phase of our development, with the exception of API support for blogging clients (which is still in branch development). Cahoots is a unique PHP/MySQL application designed primarily for online technical communities (although it's certainly suitable for many non-technical communities as well). It focuses on a Q&A model much like StackOverflow.com or ExpertsExchange.com, but completely integrates blogging, podcasting, rich media publishing, and numerous social networking-style features into a seamless online community designed first and foremost to answer questions and preserve knowledge. "Content is content" in Cahoots, and although different forms (such as a blog or a question) may be rendered differently on-screen, they're all given equal treatment when it comes to searching and discovery, since any form of content may help a technical professional solve an immediate problem. The Cahoots page on SourceForge.net includes forums for developers, for those seeking help, and a wiki with project documentation and instructions. Feature requests are being handled through Cahoots.UserVoice.com. Visit SourceForge.net/projects/cahoots for information or to download.

We've committed our v.1 release, which offers all the features outlined in our roadmap. This comprises the core functionality of our new community-building platform.

We're very close to our v.1 technology preview release for Cahoots, a new community-building platform that's different from traditional forums or CMSs. We're doing a couple of SourceForge commits per day, so we invite you to start taking a look. Our roadmap (in the SourceForge wiki) outlines what functionality will be delivered in the v.1 release.

At this point, we're especially interested in any PHP-savvy developers who might be interested in tackling some refactoring and clean-up tasks. Please contact us though our SourceForge "Help" forum if you're interested!

While Cahoots is fully customizable, it does come with a nice default "theme." We've posted some screen shots here on SourceForge highlighting major features. The fine details of these images is still subject to change, but they give a good idea of what Cahoots looks like.

Cahoots is a Web platform for building technical communities that focus primarily on answering questions and preserving knowledge for the future. Cahoots' model is based on extensive research, surveying, and experimentation, particularly focused on IT administrators (as opposed to developers, who tend to interact somewhat differently).

The primary mode of "community" today is discussion forums, with a growing emphasis on blogs and blog comments; wikis also play a role. However, most admins (over 90% in surveys) _start_ not by visiting given Web sites, but by searching for answers to specific questions. Discussion forums provide a poor means of answering questions, because future searches often hit discussion threads that either don't include an actual solution, or which require future readers to reconstruct the solution by means of the discussion's back-and-forth. ... read more

We're working toward a January v.1 alpha release. This release should enable most core functionality, including posting and viewing of all item types. Some known restrictions for this phase:

1. No MetaWeblog API functionality will be enabled

2. Searching will be on tags only, not full-text; I'm investigating the desirability of full-text search. StackOverflow doesn't offer it, and searching only on tags returns more categorized and cleaner results. Not offering full-text search also makes it MUCH more likely that we'll remain cross-database compatible; full-text ties us to one database engine's syntax unfortunately, since there are no standards and since CodeIgniter doesn't provide full-text in its database abstraction.... read more