Open Social
Open Social is the Drupal distribution for online communities — membership, groups, events, activity streams and private content, the whole social fabric, open source. For organisations that need their community's data on their own infrastructure and in their own jurisdiction, self-hosting it is the point — and that's exactly what this platform is for.
What ships on BOA
The SOC platform is rebuilt from upstream as BOA releases ship — the 13.1
line on the Drupal 10.6 core at the time of writing — so it tracks the version
Open Social itself currently publishes. Two structural quirks carry over from
upstream's own layout: the docroot is html/ (not the usual web/), and a
fresh install's front page is deliberately bare.
One thing to plan for on this platform specifically: from 13.0 onwards Open Social standardised its search on Solr, so a site you build here expects a Solr core to be available. That is a per-site prerequisite, not something the platform carries for you.
Installing a site on it
Create a site on the Open Social platform with the social profile. The
install is unattended and complete, but — like Drupal CMS — the browser-side
first-run polish doesn't happen here, so the front page of a brand-new site
looks plain, and that's healthy. Log in and the community machinery
(groups, profiles, streams) is all present; theming and landing pages are
yours to shape.
Good to know
- Communities accumulate personal data by design — the automatic nightly backups and one-task Restore matter more here than on a brochure site (Backups and restores).
- Activity streams generate constant small writes; the standard Valkey caching stack absorbs the read side without any setup (Caching).
Where to go next
- Choosing and managing platforms
— getting
SOCinto your platform list.