Is there an open source software ap like Pageflakes or Netvibes?

September 29, 2006 10:35 AM

Does anybody know of an open source web application similar to Pageflakes, Netvibes, or Google Personalized that I can run on my own web server, and extend for my own needs?

I'm looking for something that will ideally run on Apache, is AJAX-like, and offers some of the functionality seen in some of these Web 2.0 websites, but that I can modify and tweak for my own needs.

posted by stovenator to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Are you looking for a content management system? Mambo, Joomla , PHPNuke etc? Many of these have additional components or modules that would allow this sort of setup.
posted by JeremiahBritt at 10:49 AM on September 29, 2006

This site has a set of basic files you can download and manipulate to do that. I was going to try and do it myself but never really finished.
posted by dripdripdrop at 11:40 AM on September 29, 2006

This is definitely only a very partial answer, but for my own personal RSS aggregation I use rawdog which generates a static HTML page of the newses. Its decidedly web 1.0 though some clever javascripting could probably simplify some of that.
posted by Skorgu at 12:35 PM on September 29, 2006

I'm not really looking for a CMS, but rather a framework for building draggable containers, with different modules that could be in those containers.

Dripdripdops link is a pretty close match to what I'm looking for.
posted by stovenator at 1:44 PM on September 29, 2006

I've evaluated the options available for doing this before, and while the dhtmlgoodies script is cool and quick to use, its not what I'd reccommend. Its a mix of code for two completely different features; javascript RSS parsing and column-based drag-and-drop. You don't have much control over the layout, aside from deciding how many columns to use, and there's no hooks for obtaining the arrangement of boxes and sending them back to the server, where you'll presumably want to permamently record them.

That might work for you, but if you need more control, or at least want to be better able to see what's going on, I'd go with Mochikit. Version 1.4 has an excellent drag-and-drop library that will give you much more visual control over the process (letting you choose CSS classes to be applied to the draggables and droppables when they enter various states, letting you control scrolling when you drag things around a very long page, and other stuff) and give you function callbacks that can be used on various state changes so that you can record the new arrangement to the server, or whatever. If you're doing ajax-y stuff, you'll probably want Mochikit anyway... its has a bunch of stuff to help with asynchronous server requests, debugging, dynamic DOM manipulation and querying, etc.

The version you'll need, 1.4, is still in development, but it's been in development for a long time (heh) and is quite stable at this point. You'll have to download it using subversion- instructions are given. Feel free to email if you have any questions.
posted by gsteff at 2:30 PM on September 29, 2006