Open ACS / .LRN for Ubuntu – Lucid
Open ACS / LRN For Ubuntu
Firstly some background, I work for an Irish company who use the Open ACS tools, when I heard about this development I thought I’d share it with others. OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is an advanced toolkit for building scalable, enterprise-level web applications. It is also the foundation for the e-learning platform .LRN. The system is used by many organisations worldwide, including:
- Greenpeace International
- Pharmaceuticals International Network
- Project Open ]po[
- Young Americas Business Trust
- Galileo University, Guatemala
- Harvard, JFK School of Government, USA
- Massachusetts General Hospital, USA
- Quest Computing, Ireland
- Arts Council England, UK
- Los Angeles Unified School District, USA
- Ministério do Desenvolvimento Indústria e Comércio Exterior, Brazil
- Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria
- University of Heidelberg, Germany
- University of Valencia, Spain
- Spanish National University for Distance Education (UNED), Spain
- DigitalOne, Hong Kong
- Bir Zeit University, Palestine
- Elearning Network of Australasia (ElNet)
OpenACS features a collection of pre-built applications and services that you can build on to create a custom web-site or application. OpenACS uses a built-in, simple, string-oriented, scripting language, efficient multi-threading, simple and abstracted database access and connection pooling. OpenACS is derived from the ArsDigita Community System (ACS), developed by ArsDigita (now part of Red Hat). Since going open source in 1999, the OpenACS community has developed packages for user/groups management, content management, e-commerce, news, FAQs, calendar, forums, bug tracking, full-text searching and many more.
A vibrant and productive community has sprung up around OpenACS and there are many volunteer contributors as well as commercial companies able to provide support, hosting, and custom development. Extensive documentation and a Wiki, complemented by a “Getting Started” Tutorial are available. Many of the production users are actively funding and contributing work back to the project. Formal, consensus driven governance has been established (with semi-annual elections) which ensures the project serves the needs of its constituents.
Install OpenACS on Ubuntu from the community repository. OpenACS will be available as an official Ubuntu package in the middle of February.
Hi Laura,
thanks for publishing this. This is fantastic news and should bring an amazing toolkit to a wider audience.
Brian
openacs is already available in Debian sid, why not just use that??
Foo, it’s another alternative for folks to use. Yes it’s in Debian and will be in Ubuntu so it just means Open ACS is more than one distro which is a good thing.