I’ve recently begun work on a fun little open source project that I hope some people will enjoy using.

I am calling it Plank, it is a small discussion board that uses a standard folder on a file system as a database. This allows people to use sharing solutions like Dropbox to have a central database for their discussion board without the need for a centralised public server; instead each person wishing to access the forum just runs Plank locally on their own computer and accesses the board through their web browser.

I am trying to make Plank really simple to get going with a shared folder from the command line, all you have to do is start plank from the terminal with the shared folder as your directory then Plank will automatically provision the folder with a database and fire up the server at http://localhost:4567 for you to setup your profile and start posting.

Plank uses MessagePack to store each entry of each class as a file in the shared Dropbox and uses a simple Sinatra web instance to serve up the local discussion board.

You can check it out at https://github.com/callumj/Plank.