Design Community Forrst Launches Credit System for Post Promotion & More




Here’s an interesting twist on the online business model: Designer/developer community Forrst is allowing users to purchase “Acorns,” a sort of virtual currency that can be traded in for pageviews on a particular post.

Forrst is a popular site where developers and designers can share code snippets, design snapshots and interesting articles; users can also request community feedback on current projects.

Acorns and promoted posts are a big part of Forrst’s third iteration, which has been rolled out just shy of the site’s first birthday.

Acorns can be bought with Paypal; each one costs $5 and guarantees a specific number of impressions for promoted posts.

Any Forrst user can use Acorns to make sure that his or her important posts, such as job-related posts or promotional posts about new products, are seen by thousands of users in the web development and design community.

The Forrst team says Acorns will also be used for “a few things coming over the next few months,” so we’ll keep our eyes open for whatever goodies Forrst might be rolling out in early 2011.

Other changes include a new homepage (which is much less adorable but much more functional for the first-time user), a redesign of post pages, and an impressive, ground-up rewrite of the site architecture and libraries.

To accomplish this rewrite, the Forrst team wrote a PHP5 framework called Magnus, which they hope to open-source sometime in the next year. We’ll be keeping you posted on that, as well.

Forrst is also integrating with JSFiddle, Pastie and GitHub’s Gist for its code snippets.

We’re impressed with the improvements that the Forrst team is rolling out and on the impression the site has made on the web design/development community in the past year. What do you think of Acorns and the other Forrst changes in version three?


Reviews: Forrst

More About: acorns, business, community, design, forrst

For more Dev & Design coverage:

This entry was posted in acorns, business, community, design, forrst, Startup, Web Apps, Web Design, Web Development and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.