Core features include:

Custom Content: Define your own content types: posts, events, videos etc.

Multiple Sites: Manage multiple sites with only one Locomotive install.

Sexy UI: Enjoy using a simple, clear and beautiful user interface.

Inline Editing: Browse your site and edit a page at the same time.

Ruby On Rails: Locomotive runs on one of the most powerful web frameworks.

In The Cloud: Host Locomotive with Heroku, S3 and MongoHQ.

(Homepage screenshot)

It is built on a wide range of Open Source projects including: Context, Chaos Tools, Drupal, Jake, OpenLayers, Simplepie, Strongarm and many more.

Managing News allows you to aggregate RSS/Atom news items; show news as lists or entries on a Google map; search news items; republish news by bundling articles into channels; configure location tagging and maps.

It is an interesting application for creating a holistic overview of a particular news story or news theme. It has been used to track cases of the H1N1 flu outbreak around the world; it has also been used to track news stories from specific locations.

(View the introductory video)

Several Open Source software packages were used to build the platform including Apache server, MySQL databases and Drupal.

Open Atrium’s core features include:

Blog
Share ideas and receive email notifications when others post.
Notebook
Collaborate on documents, compare revisions, and print when you’re done.
Case Tracker
Create and manage projects within each of your groups.
Calendar
Add events and pull in feeds from other calendars.
Shoutbox
Share messages and links with just the people in your group.
Dashboard
See a snapshot of all the activity across your groups.
Themes
Customize the look and feel of Open Atrium.
Features
Add new functionality using Kit-compliant Features.

(OpenAtrium user interface.)

(Introductory video for users.)

Acquia Drupal is a packaged distribution of Drupal core plus commonly-used add-on modules to simplify getting started. This package – the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer – is targeted at developers and new users seeking to try Drupal on their local computer, and includes Drupal, Apache, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin and a control panel to start/stop the entire site as you start/stop your development. Once developed, it can be easily uploaded to a public web server and you’re ready to go.

Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as content management, blogs, wiki collaborative authoring, tagging, picture galleries and much more.

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL (“General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use.

Today, Drupal powers sites including the homepages of Warner Brothers Records, The New York Observer, Fast Company, Popular Science, and Amnesty International and project sites by SonyBMG, Forbes, Harvard University, and more. Drupal can be used to create personal weblogs (Tim Berners-Lee), deliver podcasts (TWIT.tv), connect online communities (SpreadFireFox.com), form artist collectives (Terminus 1525) or inform the masses (The Onion).

Use it for internal collaboration (such as an Intranet), or for creating a community site for customers, non-profit communities, or as a rich replacement for old-fashioned Forum sites. Drupal Commons is based on the popular Drupal web platform, used by hundreds-of-thousands of sites on the Internet. Commons is a pre-assembled collection of Drupal core + community contributed modules + page layouts + predefined content types + etc., creating a ready-to-use solution.

Drupal Commons – like Drupal – is fully open source, and costs nothing to use, and is released under the GPL license. Acquia Inc. Drupal Commons’ “maintainer” provides subscription support, hosting, and remote administration services for organizations seeking commercial backing for this open source project.

Magnolia Community Edition provides all the functionality needed to quickly set up a website, be productive as a content author, ensure stable operations and easily maintain the site.

Key features include:

- Inline editing
- Web-based user interface runs with any browser
- Move, copy, re-order by drag and drop
- Human readable web addresses (a.k.a. “friendly URL’s”)
- Digital asset management
- Role-based user management
- Access-controlled full-text or meta-data search
- Multilingual user interface and content
- Time-based publishing
- Workflows
- High-performance caching system

And more…

Google will expand the 200K lines of code they’ve released under the Google Wave Federation Protocol to work towards a more complete application or “Wave in a Box.”

This project will include:

- An application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system

- A fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations

- A persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)

- Refinements to the client-server protocols
gadget, robot and data API support

- Support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

Note that the project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as it exists online today, although the intention is to provide developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.

Further Reading & Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about Google Wave’s current capabilities in anticipation of the open source “Wave in a Box” version, consider Gina Trapani and Adam Pash’s Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Alternatively, you might want to take a look at the multi-author volume Beginning Google Wave for a comprehensive overview of the application and its relevance to online collaboration.

Diaspora offers an alternative to Facebook replacing FB’s centralized social web model with a more secure and convenient decentralized network.

Users have the choice of saving and controlling their data on their own hosting platform, or buying into a Diaspora one-click service. In both cases, private data is exportable across a range of platforms.

Diaspora will officially launch on the 15th September 2010. This entry will be updated with a full feature list as soon as the information is available.

Liferay Portal is an enterprise web platform for building business solutions.

Key features include:

- Content & Document Management with Microsoft Office® integration
- Web Publishing and Shared Workspaces
- Enterprise Collaboration
- Social Networking and Mashups
- Enterprise Portals and Identity Management

Further Reading & Resources

If you’re starting out with Liferay or want to deepen your knowledge of the platform, you might consider Jonas X. Yuan’s Practical Guide to Building a Complete Corporate Intranet with Liferay and/or Rich Sezov’s Liferay in Action: An Official Guide.