lovdbyless VS Community engine...which is best?

Question

So with ruby being ushered in as the new programming messiah, I'm wondering if anyone has preferences based upon ease of use, resources needed to run, usability and ease of customization.

is there a better of the two?

Answer 1

Well, any comparison of Rails-based social networking apps should also include insoshi (http://portal.insoshi.com/).

That being said, all three are very similar, and the differences come down to implementation details. Lovd and Insoshi are both full Rails apps; it is intended for you to use them as starter kits, extending them with your own customizations. Community Engine, on the other hand is a Rails plugin. This means that you can more easily add social features to an existing Rails application. However, the author has put a complete sample app on Github. They all seem to be fairly themable, but the CE templates are all in haml (great if you're a haml fan, which I'm not).

Installation may be a bit on the complex side, because there are numerous external dependencies such as RMagick and search engine interfaces. But I wouldn't consider it to be too out of line for applications with this many features.

A couple of things you can compare are how recent/often are the updates, and overall popularity. Fortunately, all three are on GitHub. which gives you comparable metrics. You can look at the network to determine update frequency, and the number of watchers, which is a rough indicator of popularity (most watchers have downloaded and at least tested the product). The stats are:

• Community Engine: 262 watchers, the author is updating frequently. There are several other CE-related products on GitHub.

• Insoshi: 503 watchers, lots of very recent commits from several authors.

• Lovd by Less: 329 watchers. The original author is no longer committing frequently (and is looking for a new maintainer) but there is one fork that is very active with recent updates.

Bottom line? There is no easily determined "better" application. Each have demos available; I would play with each one and see which one has the best fit for your needs. If you're looking to social-enable an existing app, obviously Community Engine would be easier to integrate, but otherwise the choice is wide open.