Hi Trevor
Thanks for the long message. I do appreciate the reply. I've been following the project (in terms of watching the mailing list posts to the Rails mailing list) and haven't seen much about it. That either means it works really well or people aren't using it or people are going elsewhere for support! I noticed yesterday that the El Dorado Forum itself is quite active... so, I'm now going to start tracking it.
It looks nice, seems to have many features that I want - now, I need to suck it down, install it and play with it. Was just looking for a "heads up - beware!" message before starting out. Given that there have been none yet, it's probably a good idea to go ahead with it 
As you're probably well aware, Beast (and its variants) are most commonly cited as options for integrating into regular apps... so, I was just doing a check before I start to evaluate.
The remaining answers are inline.
Trevor Turk wrote:
I'm the developer of El Dorado. I can't speak to how many people are using the app, but I've seen it around a bit. I'm under the impression that some people have forked the code, or used it for internal projects, etc as well. The people over at FiveRuns just posted a automatic installation that features El Dorado as well:
http://eldoradoapp.com/topics/249
Ya, I noticed this from the site - that's cool
I've been happily using the app for a few sites that are active, and I've been continuing to add new features from time to time. I don't think there are any major bugs or issues, but of course there are still areas that could be improved and such. I've certainly been maintaining and using the app, though, so I know that it's useable.
Good enough for me! It gives me enough confidence to go ahead and start evaluating it for our needs. I do like some of the stuff that's catered for small companies - and I think that will see us use El Dorado for more than just 1 thing in the near future.
I'd love to see El Dorado integrated into Radiant, so please do let me know if you'll be working on that. Even if you won't be putting it back out into the open-source community, it would be fun to see the product.
I would be careful of claiming "integrate" just yet.
[1] The most likely scenario currently is that Radiant runs on http://www.example.org/ and El Dorado runs on http://bbs.example.org/
[2] The second most important thing is likely to be a need to make sure that somehow Radiant and El Dorado can share the same user authentication method (for Radiant, this would NOT be the admin login to post content)
[3] This would most likely be followed by an integration where I add a sidebar in Radiant (so, I'd need to add Radius tags) that will allow us to copy across the 10 most recent posts (subject, title, author, etc.) to the Radiant site's home page (or any other page for that matter). I've done this before using Yabb2 - that site is currently offline, otherwise I'd post you a link. So, what I'd need from El Dorado is a not too complex page of 'most recent posts' and then parse that in on the Radiant side.
[4] I'd like to then see if it's possible to add simple things like tags that allow you to search for BBS posts related to the current page in the forum. So, I'm thinking that you could do <r:eldorado:search_msg q='form_helper' /> and this would find you some posts related to 'form_helper' and if it that comes back in a good easy to parse format, I'd like to show that on the Radiant page.
[5] Finally (and this is a big problem), I'd like to see if it's possible to use the 'home page' of the user inside El Dorado for adding more things - e.g., if he could bookmark something in the Radiant site, it could show up inside this user home page area.
What do you think?
I should note that there are some other good alternatives that may be easier to integrate into an existing Rails app. I don't have extensive experience with them, but here are the ones I'm aware of:
http://adva-cms.org/
http://www.toghq.com/
http://www.communityengine.org/
I'm aware of this, but I have spent quite a bit of time with Radiant and the site that I have this in mind for is already starting out on Radiant. Additionally, I'm helping to coordinate a project called 'Summer Reboot' that is helping to create documentation for Radiant, so for now, that's the chosen one: http://wiki.radiantcms.org/Summer_Reboot
Of course, I've built El Dorado to work in a way that I like, and I think it's a terrific app. Please do let me know if you decide to use it for anything - this is the whole reason that it's fun to work on open-source projects
Of course, I will. I think the main features that I'm looking for are:
1. Ease-of-use
2. Ease-of-integration (e.g. the simple pages that allow me to integrate with Radiant)
3. Spam control/ management - this is really troublesome naturally! I have this working quite well on the Mailing Lists that I administer, but it's always a problem on a BBS.
Thanks again Trevor - for building the system and for releasing it for us to use. I fear you're going to hear more from me in the coming weeks as I start to go down this path
Cheers,
Mohit.
10/22/2008 | 12:20 PM.
