Overview of the Community Engine Modules

Community Engine contains several modules providing a whole range of functions for building community web sites. These modules different access points such as Java APIs, JSP tag libraries, Struts action classes and Javascript methods for accessing the DWR AJAX framework. The JSP tag libraries are fully documented in Escenic Community Expansion Taglib Reference. Turn to the API JavaDoc included with Community Engine distribution to use the plugin API and the Struts Action classes.

You can find examples of most of the features provided by all modules in community-demo.war and we recommend that after reading through this guide and trying out some (or all) of the cookbook examples, that you turn to the community-demo.war webapp for examples on how to use the remaining set of functions available in Community Engine.

• The Auth module provides security related features. You can apply role based security constraints on the HTTP requests and your JSP pages. See further details in Security.

• The Community module provides Community Engine specific user information (as opposed to normal user information and related functions to these already available in Content Engine). Using the Struts action classes and tag library provided in this module, it is easy to implement friendship and community group related features such as making friends, joining the groups, retrieving friends and group members.

• The User Content module deals with creating, validating, editing and removing user generated content such as blogs, image, videos. Using the Struts action classes provided in this module, it is easy to implement such features. Apart from this, user creation and user login features are also included here.

• The Messaging module provides messaging for the Community Engine users. Sending messages and retrieval of the message notification are all part of this.

• The Qualification module qualifies user generated content. Rating and flagging functionality can be implemented using this module. It also qualifies a Community Engine user based on his content's qualification. The qualification of user and his content can be retrieved using the qualification tag library.

• The Tag module lets you tag content, create tag clouds, retrieve tagged content, find similar tags.

• The Statistics module deals with the action history of the Community Engine user. Based on the action history, this module can provide statistics on user and user generated content such as "most popular blogs".

• The 3rd Party Content module: Using this component, it is possible add content from 3rd party providers, such as Flick, Last.fm, Picasaweb and Twitter, to a user's profile page.

• The SSO module enables Single Sign On login on VCE sites. With this feature, you can log into an VCE site using your 3rd party ID provider credentials instead of the VCE site's.

• The Dashboard is a web application included with Community Engine which provides functionality to moderate user generated content. Using the Dashboard, you can accept or reject blogs, comments, images and videos created by users (or editorial staff) on your web site.

• Captcha support is provided for several action classes in Community Engine to ensure that only human can initiate requests to those actions. It is possible to configure VCE to use different captcha providers.