What is Gnomepal?

Gnomepal is an easy way to create online communities.  

Gnomepal's mission is to make common community facilities (blogs, forums, wikis, and more) accessible to non-technical people and organizations by providing a centralized, integrated package that is easy to install, administer, and use.  

Gnomepal is an implementation of Drupal (a popular free, open-source content management system) that blends Drupal's baseline community management facilities with new community functionality developed by the Gnomepal team. All new Gnomepal functionality is built within the Drupal framework using open-source best practices and contributed back to Drupal.  Gnomepal itself is also free and open-source.

The Gnomepal project was conceived in early 2008 by a group of community developers, spearheaded by Chris Pirillo, who saw Drupal as the best available raw material for building online communities, but felt a specific community-oriented implementation could ease deployment.

The goal of the Gnomepal project is to identify the facets of Drupal best suited for community building, create whatever community features Drupal may currently lack, and assemble the results into a wizard-installed package consisting of the Drupal core bundled with a portfolio of community-oriented Drupal modules, themes, and essential building blocks.

For more information about the Gnomepal project, please see the Gnomepal Wiki