Import blog entries from the whole blogsphere into your blog stream with Roundhouse; our social blogging tool.

Roundhouse is a lightweight easy to learn and use blogging tool. You can install it for just yourself or for many people to each have their own blog.

Roundhouse was built as an experiment to see if we can incorporate a blogroll into the main blog feed in a way that you could gather blog entries from friends into your blog to create a combination of your blog entries and your favourite blog entries from your friends to create a social blog.

• Install as a single blog or a service to host many separate blogs.
• OpenID support.
• Import RSS feed items directly into your blog.
• Import Digg items directly into your blog.
• Upload many pictures for inclusion in your blog.
• Import Youtube movies into your blog.
• Blog archive built in.
• Tagcloud built in.
• RSS feed built in.
• Highlights listing.
• Receive comments on blogs.
• Share blog entries (to del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon and Technorati).
• Optimized for Google indexing.
• Themed "skins" which can be easily downloaded and added.
• Multi-lingual.
• Easy to use publishing system.
• Lightweight easy to use interface.
• Free (GPL) software license (if we get 100 supporting messages).

Tom's blog is a blog from Tom Calthrop (maintainer of Roundhouse) and founding director of Barnraiser.

The blog is using an out of the box copy of Roundhouse.

Roundhouse requires a web server running either Apache 1.3/2.x or IIS5/IIS6 with PHP5.x installed including GD library and Gettext (Curl and BCMath if you want OpenID support).

For multiple instances you will require wildcard sub-domains.

Latest version is 0.1 Alpha : tar / zip.

This is an Alpha release. If you have suggestions or comments please visit our feedback network. If you need assistance please visit our support network.

Guides

• The Roundhouse users guide.

Videos

• A video introducing Roundhouse.

Demonstration

• Login to our demonstration by pressing the "manage" link (base of page) then using the email "spam@barnraiser.org" and the password of "demonstration".

Themes

• Non available yet.

Language packs

• Non available yet.

Originally built in the East by the Shakers in the 1800s, round barns typically had a silo in the center and cattle housed on the sides. This arrangement made feeding cattle easier as the hay was only a few feet away. Round barns were advocated by farmers' books and journals as progressive and scientific.