]> High level information: What is OpenACS? OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. If you're thinking of building an enterprise-level web application, OpenACS is a solid, proven foundation that will give you a 3-6 month headstart. OpenACS is also a collection of pre-built applications and services that you can use to build your web site/application. Through a modular architecture, OpenACS has packages for user/groups management, content management, e-commerce, news, FAQ, calendar, forums, bug tracking, full-text searching, and much more. OpenACS relies on AOLserver, the free, multithreaded, scalable, Tcl-enabled, web/application server used by America On-Line for most of its web sites, and a true acid-compliant Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). Currently OpenACS supports PostgreSQL, an open source RDBMS, and Oracle. (read more) The OpenACS toolkit is based on the ArsDigita Community System. ArsDigita (now part of Red Hat, Inc.) kindly made their work available under the GPL, making all of this possible. The OpenACS community would like to hear your comments and help you in your endeavors with the system. Stop by our web site and feel free to ask a question, post ideas or whatever. &release-notes; Help to the folks keeping an OpenACS installation up and running. &install-overview; &operating-system; &oracle; &postgres; &aolserver; &openacs; &nextsteps; &credits; This walks you through an OpenACS installation under Windows. &win2k; This is the place to look if you want to extend OpenACS and build on top of what's already here. Here you can find out about the guts of the system. A tour of what you need to know in order to extend OpenACS. &packages; &objects; &rp; &api; &templates; &permissions; &subsites; Developer information that doesn't really fit anywhere else. &parties; &permissions-tedious; &object-identity; &programming-aolserver; &dbprimer; &psgml-mode; &design-template; &requirements-template; &versioning; &constraint-naming; &filenaming; &plsql-standards; Compared to its predecessors, version &version; of OpenACS has a much more structured organization, i.e. the most significant change is found at the system architecture level, reflected in the following hierarchy: The OpenACS &version; Kernel, which handles system-wide necessities such as metadata, security, users and groups, subsites, and package management and deployment. The OpenACS &version; Core, which comprises all the other packages that ship with the kernel and are most frequently needed by users, such as templating, bboard, and user registration/management. The packages tend to be developed and distributed with the kernel. OpenACS &version; Application packages, which typically provide user-level web services built on top of the Kernel and Core. Such packages include those built by ArsDigita as well as external contributors. Application packages are developed separately from the Kernel, and are typically released independently of it. This document provides a high level overview of the kernel package. Documentation for the other packages can be found elsewhere. &objects-req; &objects-design; &permissions-req; &permissions-design; &groups-req; &groups-design; &subsites-req; &subsites-design; &apm-req; &apm-design; &security-req; &security-design; &security-notes; &rp-req; &rp-design; &db-api; &tcl-doc; &bootstrap-acs;