Bevey

Bevey is an Open Source social networking system (akin to MySpace) that allows for multiple users to interact on a number of levels. From blogging, sharing photos, sending messages, maintaining a friends list, sharing information about themselves, customizing their pages and more - users can build a community that is centered around topics that are important to them. Niche community groups may be able to avoid "static" and spam that is found on larger community sites. Additionally, Bevey is built on valid XHTML and fully skinnable via CSS.

The newest beta version of Bevey is available now for download and installation. If you've been interested in having a community site of your own for your gaming clan / guild, church, sports club, class project or special interest group, you can be up in running with a Bevey community quickly and painlessly - completely free of charge (you'll need to host it yourself though).

If you're interested in trying out Bevey, you're always welcomed to sign up here and see what it has to offer. You'll need a valid email address, but it's used only for verification and (optional) system messages. No spam - promise.

I've been making plans of things I'd like to see in the next version of Bevey. The list keeps growing and in order to make things more flexible, I've decided to make some very fundamental changes to much of the code and database structure. Version 0.5 will be considerably different from the 0.4 releases - making upgrading very difficult, if not impossible.

As so much is going to be changing, the timeline for it is pretty long. I'm hoping to have a release available mid to late summer. Functionally, there will be a few improvements, but under the hood, I plan on improving many areas.

I'm also considering integrating a JS framework into the default Bevey download. I'm leaning toward DOM Assistant at the moment as it seems to be very lightweight and functional - everything I need, nothing I don't.

Most of the changes that have been made to Bevey in the last 6 months or so have been minor feature additions - but largely performance features and code cleanup. The whole thing had basically been re-written for 0.4. Looking forward, I still see a few areas that I would like to improve before adding features. Which brings me to my big request: what bugs have you found, settings you find confusing, errors you get, features that need to be tweaked or things that should be added?

The next few weeks will be spent firming up everything that's available now without introducing any new features (and inevitable bugs that come with them). Once this is done, however, what would you like to see added?

This has been a pretty extensive update from 0.3 Beta. There are too many things to list, but the highlights can be found in the Changelog.

You can download the newest version of Bevey from the official download page or check it out of SVN repository.

Questions and comments are always welcome. If you're having trouble installing Bevey, chances are it's my fault - let me know!

Update: A small update version - 0.4.2 Beta - is now available. Check the changelog if you're curious.