Crowd Fusion Beta

Crowd Fusion beta and open source information

Sep 23, 2009 6:02 PM

We've received a lot of questions about our open source private beta process. Everyone who applied for beta access was sent the following email two days ago. For those of you who didn't apply we are republishing it here.

Thanks for signing up for Crowd Fusion's private beta program! We're energized by the positive response we've received to our announcement at TechCrunch50. We are limiting the distribution of the open source code to a handful of developers to start to make sure our installation process is smooth and our documentation is clear. We'll be granting access to more and more people every week, so please bear with us if you do not get in right away.

We have been working on Crowd Fusion for over two years, but we only started migrating the code to our new framework and plugin architecture six months ago. So in some ways our codebase is mature and in others it's really new. The open source version of our platform is Crowd Fusion version 2.0. We built Crowd Fusion 1.0 as a prototype with a focus on our specific model for building full-featured vertical sites. In preparing our open source release we have streamlined and refactored much of the code to be more flexible for external development (plugins, inversion of control, event model) and are rebuilding some things we had already built in version one. As you receive access to this private beta, please keep in mind that you are seeing an early release and please tell us as you encounter bugs or if you have any questions or feedback.

We will be updating the documentation and news on our site frequently.

Brian gave Robert Scoble a tour of our platform several weeks before our open source announcement that will give you a better idea of what Crowd Fusion is all about.

If you missed TechCrunch50, you can watch our presentation on Ustream.

And, finally, please follow Crowd Fusion on Twitter.

Thanks again for signing up for our Crowd Fusion private beta program. We look forward to seeing what you do with Crowd Fusion!

Sincerely,
Brian, Craig, Ryan and C.K.