It is totally beta time! Communit.as 1.6 (Anglethorpe) is avilable for download!

Please check it out! We look forward to your feedback!

It will now be held on Thursday, February 26th from 6-8pm (still at CubeSpace).

We changed the date because several people pointed out that Legion of Tech’s Ignite Portland 5 is on the 19th, when we had orginally planed to have the party.

Many of the same people will want to attend both events. Now they can! High fives all around!

So, finally after what…two years? We’re launching this thing.

It’s official. Break out your party hat and meet us at CubeSpace.

The details:

Communit.as Launch Party

Thursday, Febrary 19th 26th 6pm-8pm
Live at CubeSpace
622 SE Grand Ave, PDX

There will be snacks, drinks, a demo and a Q&A session with the developers.

If you want to let us know you’re coming, that would be awesome! Hope to see you there!

Speaking of the default theme, I’d like to give the proverbial shout-out to The Swift Collective, an digital branding agency here in PDX. Swift is using (and significantly extending) communit.as for a very large client implementation and as such has contributed quite a number of resources to the open source project. Swift gets open source at a very profound and pragmatic level and we’re very happy to have their help.

First off, they’re designing and implementing our default application theme, which I think is probably the most important non-engineering related task for the launch. Then, in the early part of 2009, they’ll have polished off the first version of the communit.as CMS tool, which will serve as the foundation of a lot of other internal projects going forward. Finally, Swift also contributes a critical resource to our project, in that they provide us with office space so we don’t have to work out of my dining room anymore.

We’ve made some platform and tool changes that are pretty important and worth mentioning. The biggest one is that we’ve decided to ditch phpdocumentor in favor of Natural Docs. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the biggest one is that phpdocumentor makes it very tedious (if not impossible) to generate documentation for our plugin API. Natural Docs makes this much easier and has the side benefit of being able to document everything from our PHP code to our JavaScript to our SQL files.

We’ve also started using phing for packaging, replacing our rather tedious (read: Jaybill copies a bunch of files and runs a tar command) manual build process.

We’re also hoping to throw together some kind of swanky (or at least semi-swanky) launch party here in PDX, so stay tuned for news on that.

As an aside, you probably noticed that we’re using WordPress to run our site here. That’s because the aformentioned CMS module has not come online yet. Sometime in early 2009 we’ll relaunch the site using communit.as. On the day of the product launch, (in December) we’ll also launch some sort of forums to tide us over until we can use the communit.as forums. This may seem kind of like we’re not eating our own dog food. Guilty as charged. We just thought it was more important to get the first version out the door than it was to create the be-all, end-all community site for the project that we eventually want to have.

As you can probably tell, we’re in the process of revamping the site. (When you do something for the first time, is that vamping? I don’t know.)

The good news is that the much awaited launch, complete with a downloadable beta version, is just around the corner. We’re in high gear readying documentation and installation scripts.

In addition to all the stuff that goes along with shipping a usable platform, we also felt it was important to provide a really solid default theme so everyone would have a reasonable starting point for making their own themes. We feel this is as important as anything on the back end and we’re taking a little extra time to make sure we get it right.

Were also going to throw a mother of a party in PDX when we do actually launch, so stay tuned for news on that.