The Concursive Platform: services for mobile and web

Posted by Matt Rajkowski on April 14, 2014, 7:30 AM EDT

You may have heard about Concursive's community, social, and e-commerce feature-set which includes user profiles, activity streams, blogs, calendar events, wikis, forums, tagging, bookmarks, and more, but did you know that when when users interact with a Concursive-based app or site, they are interacting with a service? Concursive has made substantial progress in the web world in the last 7 years to make essential app functionality a part of its customizable platform.

Whether you are going mobile-first, web-first, or launching both, the Concursive platform at a high level solves common problems easily via configuration. Developers concentrate on the parts that make their app unique, while still using APIs and design patterns encouraged by the Concursive framework which work on both mobile and web.

There are many out-of-the-box examples which would otherwise range from easy to difficult to implement on your own:

• A user account system which handles usernames, passwords, invitations, settings and password reset functionality across mobile and web, optionally integrating with Facebook.
• Managing user permissions. Through a badge system users can be identified with multiple roles and responsibilities.
• Managing user groups and whether those groups are private, public, or publicly visible but with authorization by a user manager for additional access.
• Setting up your own spaces. We include spaces for groups, ideas, projects, accounts, businesses, organizations and programs. Create anything, even spaces for trees or stock quotes. Any topic you want your users to collaborate around.
• Geolocation services which easily access Google, MapQuest, and Open Street Maps to geocode locations and display them on devices or web maps. The Concursive API can order all locations by nearest-to-you.
• Storing user generated images in the right size and format to the device or browser needing them.
• Interfacing with video services like YouTube to obtain meta-data, thumbnails and embed codes for videos.
• Importing data from RSS feeds is as easy as entering the feed's URL. The connectivity is scheduled, queued and downloaded into the database. RSS feeds can be integrated into blogs, activity streams or displayed on their own.
• Indexing all data is done immediately so that it's easy to query, search, sort, geolocate and filter user-generated content, photos, and text captured from uploaded documents.
• Sending a push notification is as easy as providing the user IDs and the message to send. The platform uses the right mechanisms for the right platforms for those users. 
• The platform has its own order processing system which integrates with Authorize.net, Chargify and iOS in-app purchases to track and verify purchases.
• The services are location aware, based on the user's context, and accesses the data the user is allowed to access.

Those are just several examples which are transparently used on every Concursive installation. Once the platform is installed, your enhancements go into a configuration directory for customizing the user experience, email messages, background jobs, additional APIs, automated workflows, page layouts, CSS, and code.

Learn more by reviewing the ConcourseConnect feature summary.

This post was inspired by Brent Simmons and his experience with app development.