OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. If you're thinking of building an enterprise-level web application, OpenACS is a solid, proven foundation that will give you a 3-6 month headstart.

OpenACS is also a collection of pre-built applications and services that you can use to build your web site/application. Through a modular architecture, OpenACS has packages for user/groups management, content management, e-commerce, news, FAQ, calendar, forums, bug tracking, full-text searching, and much more.

OpenACS relies on AOLserver, the free, multithreaded, scalable, Tcl-enabled, web/application server used by America On-Line for most of its web sites, and a true acid-compliant Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). Currently OpenACS supports PostgreSQL, an open source RDBMS, and Oracle. (read more)

The OpenACS toolkit is based on the ArsDigita Community System. ArsDigita (now part of Red Hat, Inc.) kindly made their work available under the GPL, making all of this possible.

The OpenACS community would like to hear your comments and help you in your endeavors with the system. Stop by our web site and feel free to ask a question, post ideas or whatever.