#20: Open Social and Drupal Distro Dream

Deploy Friday

Open Social is a Drupal distribution and online community platform. We speak with the founders, Taco Potze and Bram ten Hove, in our episode today about how Open Social was born out of the idea to productize community building.

Open Social origin story

Taco and Bram started Open Social after 14 years of Drupal agency experience. Taco says, “We stumbled upon this amazing use case of building a SaaS platform around social communities where we quickly host, maintain, and deploy your installations.”

Features focused on community

Open Social’s feature set is centered around community tools. Bram says out-of-the-box, Open Social gives users the ability to:

• Maintain a detailed user profile
• Create events, and discussions around them
• Produce and publish activity streams
• Build landing pages
• Customize your community your use cases

What sets Open Social apart

The idea of Drupal distributions is not new. Taco gives several reasons Open Social is different from other distros: “I think with Open Social, you get 80% of what you need, you only need to do the 20% yourself. So out of the box, it's just a super stable framework. We use the distribution very much for our own internal social internet. It has events and groups and the stream and progressive web app in core. So it's out-of-the-box, just a usable product that you can fine tune to your specific needs.”

The (funded) future of Open Social

Open Social raised 1.2 million Euros recently from investors keenly interested in Open Social’s success. Bram says they have a plan set in place for the capital. “We'll be using some of the funds we raised to really enhance that experience for site managers and content managers, to use Open Social out-of-the-box without having to read a manual.”

In addition, Bram and Taco’s vision for the future is to give back to the Drupal community. Taco explains further, “So our focus is really on how we can build sustainable open source projects that are giving back to the community. And how we can build a model around that where we can actually maintain a healthy situation, attract good investors, hire great developers, and build a good product in the end. And I think we're finding that model.”

Use Open Social on Platform.sh to build your community
Platform.sh
Learn more about us.
Get started with a free trial.
Have a question? Get in touch!

Platform.sh on social media
Twitter @platformsh
Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr
LinkedIn: Platform.sh
LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh
Facebook: Platform.sh

Watch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Buzzsprout

Platform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.