looking for a barebone social network framework in Ruby/Rails

Few weeks ago, I learned that I might be about to get some relief from the need to do PHP — and might get allowed to do Rails. Days later, I learned for the current site, Rails might get used as well. Only issue: The current project leader’s not yet too familiar to Rails himself. So, I shall go ahead, he’d follow. And, if yet so, whether I would like to work on a replacement framework, to be done in Rails, for the current PHP one.

Well, having a CMS in a crappy language and add-ons for community issues at hand is one thing. Developing all that from scratch, just a completely different one. Therefore, I looked out for some helpful tools or frameworks.

To be honest: In reality, I looked for some barebone social-network gem which I could tailor to my needs by adding some details by my own. I realized that 37signals, 43things, twitter and many more are just based on such a framework, so one could imagine one of them might have open-sourced their base framework. But… no. — Despite I didn’t find any such framework yet, I am still not convinced that there is none. Probably, I just didn’t find it yet. But the imaginary light bulb went on, making me imagine to launch a free software project on sourceforge or wherenot going after just that – a barebone social framework, done in Rails — or even Ruby, if possible, so even people using Waves or else might be able to make use of it.
 

So, here you get, what I found today:

• a site mentioning “Rails social networking how-to books, »Railspace« and »Practical Social Networking on Rails«” [...] “many available social networking open source platforms for PHP developers, including PHPIzabi.net, Vastal’s ambitious mySpace and Youtube clones and Consummating.com’s open source version of its popular social app” [...] “Rails does have the majority of plugins needed to quickly deploy a social application. In this repository [agilewebdevelopment.com] alone, there is a ton of great plugins, many like make ratable, commentable, google Maps are perfect for a community site.”
• realized that ning.com offers access to its source code — which is PHP, hence matches our current needs
• a book available at amazon.com: “Practical Rails Social Networking Sites (Expert’s Voice) : By Alan Bradburne” — I think, our company could afford to buy that one (if upgraded to Rails 2!), especially as they are about to dive into that market even deeper and need the expertise. One more note from one of the book’s reviewers: “[...] gem was RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) – which also teaches ROR through building a social networking site.”
• Err The Blog throws in (as of Jan/2007): “Since it seems like we did something correct, I’d like to share with you our toolbox. We have no golden hammer, but we sure use some kickass open source software. So here’s a high level overview of what we got.” — Keeps its word. Very recommedned read. It also mentions: “monit can even replace mongrel cluster.” Never heard of monit before and were teached about the mongrel cluster easiness during the last Rails geeks session here at Cologne. However, if Err The Blog mentions that tool, I’ll keep it on my radar until I see myself.
• Agile Web Development (already mentioned above) offers a list of “Top-Rated Plugins“. Well, and then there is an index like series of numbers at the end of the page, 1 .. 67, and a mention “Displaying 16 – 30 of 993″. So, there might be quite a huge collection of Rails Plug-Ins.