What is Radio Community Server?

Radio Community Server (RCS) is a software application for Radio UserLand or Frontier/Manila that makes it possible for individuals or organizations to host communities of Radio users. It offers all of the community functionality currently offered by UserLand's centralized system.

RCS is the perfect product for the development of private knowledge networks that live behind firewalls in corporate or institutional environments. It also is perfect for publications and ISPs that want to host public communities on their own systems. By offering this software for free, UserLand is saying: Let's Grow Communities Now.

Requirements

Radio Community Server is an application designed to run, at no additional cost, in either the Frontier environment or Radio UserLand. In both cases a fully updated 8.x release is required.

You can run RCS on Windows or Macintosh OS. In both cases the modern version of the OS is highly recommended -- Windows NT, 2000 or XP; or Macintosh OS X.

Features...

• RCS is as easy to install as Radio itself. Download it into the Tools folder, it activates, with an easy to use Prefs system that makes customization a breeze. Your community can be up and running within five minutes of downloading the sotware.

• Host a private community behind a corporate firewall, or a public one focused on a specific topic or political interest. You can use Radio to plan projects, develop plans, share confidential information, with the same ease of use that Radio is famous for.

• Implements the server side of Radio upstreaming, rendered content flows from your users' desktops through RCS to fast static storage. Far more efficient than centralized editing and rendering systems.

• A community updates page, patterned after Weblogs.Com, that shows the recently updated weblogs of members of your community.

• Tracking of hits and referrals for your community members, and maintaining a Top-100 list of most visited weblogs, on a daily basis, and for all time. Statistics about XML channel subscriptions maintained, with readouts.

• Full control of file types managed by the community server.

• Complete readout of server events with up-to-the-minute information.

• Administration at a user level helps keep your community server correctly configured.

• Support for comments on weblog posts for members of your community.

• SOAP and XML-RPC interfaces for community services and for desktop tools.

• Free software updates, features and fixes.

• Easy customization through UserTalk scripting language, object database, extensive verb set. Callbacks make it easy to write code that extends and customizes UserLand-supplied functionality.

• Automated backups to make sure that your community won't lose data if there's trouble on the server.

• Hourly email reports provide summaries the status of your server.

• Publish-subscribe notification for RSS and OPML documents hosted by the community server.

Discuss

Alternatively, can Radio users belong to more than one RCS?

Also, can I host more than one RCS on a single Radio/Manila server?

Discuss

It seems to me that Frontier/Manila and Radio/RCS are both a client-server solution. With Manila, the browser is the client. With Radio/RCS, Radio is both a server and a client, and works in conjunction with another client, a web browser (sort of a client-server-server solution).

Other than easing the processor load and disk space requirements on the central server, does the Radio/RCS model have benefits that cannot be provided by Manila?

Is it prudent to imagine that it could require additional administrative effort to support Radio/RCS compared to supporting Frontier/Manila because of the additional moving parts on the client machines (ie. Radio)?

Discuss

With Radio, users in a workgroup can subscribe to each other's RSS feeds and workgroup news will flow to all the subscribers through the News Aggregator.

Discuss

Any way to provide Radio functionality to many users from one Frontier or Radio installation?

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I know there is the opportunity to use Userlands servers for hosting comments on blogs hosted by an RCS server, but what about someone who wants to run a private comments host? i.e. someone who is running RCS for a purely internal (i.e. behind a firewall) project where the comments are as sensitive as the posts themselves?

Is there something available from Userland for this or another third party?

Thanks.

PK.

Discuss

The comments feature is implemented using Manila So if you were running a copy of Frontier/Manila, you could host your own comments server internally.

radio.userland.com/stories/storyReader$10854#notesForManilaUsers

Lawrence

Discuss

Discuss

I believe I've followed the instructions for installing RCS in Frontier.

All I get on things like: rcs.mydomain.com/rcsPublic/

is

Sorry! There was an error: Can't find a sub-table named "rcspublic". The error was detected by Frontier 8.0.5 in mainResponder.respond. Webmaster: wm@mydomain.com. Time: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 00:36:57 GMT.

Environment: Frontier 8.0.5 running on Win2K server.

Discuss

For example, it appears that the rcsComments manila site gets setup with my LAN IP address (I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling this with proper WAN IP and port but this didn't help). Perhaps other values are set at install using this assumption.

I can access frontier on port 8080 just fine but attempts to access http//rcs/mydomain.com:8080/rcsPublic give the

Sorry! There was an error message as stated above: Can't find a sub-table named "rcspublic"...

The request are indeed making it through to frontier as the status message hit counter increments.

Discuss