Merbunity.com is a unique approach to a community site built around the awesomeness that is Merb. Merbunity is a site intended for the Merb commUnity, that’s built up by the community.

So what’s so cool about it? Well… It’s built with Merb for starters ;)

Anyone can submit content to Merbunity that may be of interest to the Merb community. So if you feel like making a screencast, tutorial, or have some news, lets have it!

What makes Merbunity unique (afaik) is it’s peer review system. When you sign up, you can create content, work on it in draft form and then when its ready, publish it. When you do this though, it’s not published straight away. It’s put into a pending state where people who are publishers can review and comment on it. Essentially they help you make it a great submission. Once it’s tweaked up just right, a publisher can publish it, making it live. The idea is two fold.

1. It helps people understand what the community expects in terms of quality of the posts
2. It should help keep out the spammers

Once you have 3 items published, you become a publisher yourself and can help direct the content of the site. That means you can publish others, and your own content at will. We figure by that stage, you know what the community expects to help make the site great.

This really is an experiment in this form of publishing and we’re really hoping that the community will jump on board and make it great. I’m sorry to say also, that not all of our planned features are implemented yet. There’s such a pressing need for good documentation for Merb, I figured that the basic functionality of the site is more important to get out there for people to use than each and every feature being perfect, and all graphical issues being ironed out.

Thanx the the awesome efforts of Luke Sutton merbunity looks great. Any graphical glitches that may be present are my fault for fiddling with it ;)

Well I think that’ll do for a basic introduction. I really hope you’ll find the site useful, and that we’ll get some great content on here that helps us all out when we’re developing in Merb :)