Gerard gently asked me to write a post about Shapado and so I obliged today.
We're a bunch of developers who live in South America, David and Jorge Cuadrado live in Colombia, the awesome country where they build castles on bridges because they're bad ass and I, truly yours, live in Peru where people enjoy cutting rain drops with scissors just because they can.
We all work on Shapado which is a (buzz word alert!) free, useful, social, ajaxy, wikiy, HTML5y, reputationy, reddiggy Q&A forum.
What does that mean exactly? Well, Q&A means people can ask questions and answer them. Reddiggy means people can vote on the best questions and best answers. Useful means you don't have to read 10 answers before finding the best answer to a question, because the most voted answers get to the top of the page. Reputation means users can be trusted because when they give nice answers that get tons of votes, their reputation gets up, which is a sign of trust. HTMLl5 means that when your browser or computer gets a nasty crash, all is not lost thanks to local storage. Wiki means answers that suck can be edited, improved or just deleted. Ajax means you don't have to refresh the whole page every time you need to do something but it still work for noscript addicts. Social because you can login with your OpenID or even twitter and facebook and link your accounts together. Free means it's free as in freedom so you can hack it anyway you want, but if you just want to give it a try, there's a hosted version that enables you to create your forum in a couple of seconds.
Anyway, you get the idea. We also have a great moderation/admin interface and customizable UI with themes, JavaScript, ads, analytics and whatnot. Last but not least, thanks to the awesome translatewiki.net project, we're available in a gazillion language now so don't hesitate to help on that front or on the code.
We're also pretty edgy when it comes to our stack, the whole thing runs on Rails with MongoDB as the database through the MongoMapper ORM, which is pretty rad too. Anyway, I hope you find it interesting and, have fun giving it a try.
Cheers,
Patrick Aljord
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