forem
For empowering community 🌱
Open-source community platform software, the same codebase that powers dev.to, for launching your own fully featured community website with article publishing, comments, user profiles, and moderation tools.
Forem is open-source software for building online communities. It is the platform that powers DEV (dev.to), a community website for software developers. Anyone can take the Forem code and use it to build their own community platform — a space where members can write articles, participate in discussions, build profiles, and connect with each other.
The problem it solves: building a community website from scratch is complex. You need user accounts, content publishing, comments, moderation tools, notifications, search, and much more. Forem provides all of this out of the box, ready to deploy and customize, under an open-source license.
How it works: you deploy Forem on a server, configure it with your community's name and settings, and it becomes a fully functioning community site. Members can sign up, write posts (in Markdown), comment, follow each other, and receive notifications. Site owners and moderators can manage content and users through an admin dashboard. The interface is similar to what you see on dev.to.
You would use Forem when you want to launch a community website — for a fanbase, a professional group, customers of a product, or any group of people — without building the platform from the ground up.
The tech stack is Ruby on Rails on the backend, with Preact (a lightweight JavaScript UI library) on the frontend.
Where it fits
- Launch a community website for your product users where they write tutorials, ask questions, and help each other.
- Create a niche professional community platform, like a dev.to for a specific industry, without building it from scratch.
- Deploy an internal knowledge-sharing site for your team with blog posts, comments, and searchable member profiles.
- Run a fan or interest community with article publishing, discussion threads, and member follow features.