For the last three months we have been preparing Crowd Fusion in anticipation of an announcement that will put our framework in the hands of hundreds and hopefully thousands of developers and media companies. The timing was right, so we applied for TechCrunch 50 and were honored by the opportunity to present on stage and give this announcement.  Our framework, codename sprung, and Crowd Fusion CMS are now open source licensing.  For the next 6 to 8 weeks we'll be taking beta signups and working with developers who apply in preparation for a full public release.

Our core framework now uses Inversion of Control (IoC) and an event model to allow developers full access to the framework and easily extend it using plugins.  Layered on top of the framework is Crowd Fusion CMS, a set of plugins that give access to some core features we believe any web publishing venture needs.   News, Profiles, Media, Members and Comments are plugins in the Crowd Fusion CMS that give great examples of working with the framework and are easily extendable to accomplish unique implementations and applications.

There are many features we'll be writing about and exposing with our documentation, including a unique rendering engine, graph database implementation, robust tagging model, and much more.  There are many people to thank that helped us get to this milestone, specifically Ryan Scheuermann who was instrumental in the architectural design of our technology migration.   

Another Milestone accomplished yesterday on Crowd Fusion, the permissions system was put live in production.  The fundamentals of the permissions system are similar to many others that you'll find on the web.

• Members authenticate through a signin form.
• Members belong to Teams (a.k.a Groups).
• Content (pages, news, photos) can be limited to one or many teams.

The tagging system and our tag widget makes the tasks of adding the groups to the content and filtering the content powerfully dynamic and simple to learn.  

The underlying structure of Crowd Fusion is definitely out of prototype, through alpha and solidly Beta.  Brian and I spent last Thursday going over the Elements of Crowd Fusion and the Inbound and Outbound linking structure connecting each element to one another.   Needless to say it answered some nagging questions about the interplay between things like media and news and allowed me to 'finalize' how galleries and project pages will be handled on this site.

An example of this inter-connectivity is when you go to an individual project page like Crowd Fusion you get a synopsis and a list of what I'm writing in regards to that project. These are much more defined relationships than simple tags.  Within the CMS you have the ability to specify these relationships to the individual content that you are working with and configure the output to your liking.

Galleries are similar to project pages but instead of linking writing to pages you are linking media.  In the case of Fall FIshing with Rob, the media are photos.   Having media as a separate element that is linked  into content allows for the creation of different viewing methods very simple with our templating language.

• /galleries/ gives a list of galleries with thumbnails.
• /gallery/fall-fishing-plum-gut-with-rob/ shows the gallery information larger photos.
• /media/2008/01/28/early-morning-with-rob/  is a permalink for each media item.

Comments are an element to themselves and can be linked to any other element.  So a complete comment thread could be left on a gallery or on the individual media item.  For my pages I'd rather not have comments on the galleries, so I left it out of the template.

In December the fledgling Crowd Fusion Team met in Philadelphia for 3 days of coding, colaberation and consumption.  Below is the group enjoying the Feast of Seven Fishes with the author of EZ Street  Robert Tinnell.   Alex Hilman gracious let us live in Independents Hall conference room.  For the first time at Crowdfusion design, process, and development began to gel into a solid product offering.  We met our old buddy Mike Propst in Philadelphia, he joined us for dinner, and gave us some great design feedback.

Alex is running what is quickly becoming a model co-working space that makes Philadelphia a very attractive gathering point for small virtual work forces on the east coast.   We will definitely be revisiting Philadelphia in the coming year.

Clockwise Top Left to Bottom Left: Brian Alvey, Ryan Scheuermann, Mike Propst, Craig Wood, Judith Meskill, and Robert Tinnell

A search on Google yields 450K results for 'Blogging Excuses'.  Obviously you have the common ones, "The Dog ate my Keyboard", "I was hit by a bus", and the ever popular variety of zombie attacks.   I don't have any excuses and frankly don't owe my mom or the other two of you readers any.

So I have a new look, it is a variation of the sample site that we just finished for CrowdFusion.  The speed of changing templates was everything Brian and I dreamed it would be.  Adding content shouldn't be a chore anymore -- and my blog will stop breaking everytime we add additional weapons to our publishing arsenal.

You'll notice two themes now on my blog Reading and Writing, 'Rythmatic is not around the corner, you can put down your number 2 pencils.  This post is an example of writing, the Reading is the stuff I've filtered out of the news feeds that I follow, I'm proud to say our news reader is now better than Google Reader and completely integrated with the platform.

More great stuff coming soon. Also if you are a Virtually Enabled Developer looking to join our team send us your resume.