Who's AcornRack for?

In a word, him, her, them over there in the corner and, oh… you and everyone else! AcornRack is designed to be as user friendly as possible—you don't have to be a Web wizard to create a fully functional site. Don't forget that AcornRack is 100% free. There are no trials, no hosting fees, no bandwidth costs and certainly no hidden charges!

If you are lucky enough to be knowledgeable in the art of Web development then fear not—everything can be customised. We don't just mean you can change a colour here and a sentence there, no, we are talking full access to the HTML, CSS and the way your site functions! You even have full SQL access!

You can brand the site however you want, even change the domain name to your very own, perfect for your personal site or one of your clients. There's a whole lot more to discover about AcornRack, so we invite you to have delve deeper by clicking on some of the headings just over there on the ←left hand side.

Build upon a pre-built foundation

We understand how annoying it can be creating your site and spending many sleepless nights fixing that one bug that just can't be squashed. Even "off-the-shelf" applications require you to spend hours downloading, uploading, installing, configuring… you get the idea. None of that here. Simply type the name of the site you want and hey-presto! Site made! It's almost like magic, but so much cooler.

That's why we built AcornRack. It provides an incredibly flexible foundation for you to build upon. User control, a sophisticated admin control panel, forums, polls, messaging are just a few of the many features.

Interact with a database

We love databases. You love databases. It just makes sense that you get your very own database to interact with—and it's 100% unrestricted.

Our ethos is to keep things simple, so even if you have never used a database before then you're in for a treat! We supply all the tools you would ever need to setup & manage your database and allow you to backup all your tables whenever you please.

A seasoned DBA, or Database Administrator, wont feel out of place either. You can interact with the database through our direct SQL editor, performing any operation you want. Migrating your database couldn't be easier, either. Simply create a dump your old database and paste the SQL into the direct SQL editor and hit the import button. It really is as simply as that.

Full access to every aspect of your users

Users are the basis of every site. Without them a site is, well, kinda dull. But don't fear, members can join your site quickly and easily, only having to supply a username and email address! You can design your signup form by adding more input fields, all of which are attached to the users account—and if you wish to inspect signups before granting permission then you can view their entire application on the spot!

Saving and accessing data about users is where it's at. With AcornRack it really couldn't be simpler. There are three main ways to do this, first being through the use of forms which when submitted will instantly add all the details to their account. The second being directly from the page without having to submit anything and lastly through your control panel.

A quick visit to our school. You can find out how to do all this and more by visiting our extensive documentation.

You want features? You've come to the right place!

We could keep you here all day explaining the intricacies and possibilities of AcornRack. Instead, we're just going to blow your mind with a few examples.

Create pages, say who can view & edit them, see when they were last updated and update them with our syntax highlighting editor. Create polls, set access to who can see them and vote, say when they begin, when they end, and whether to pause them.

Forums, group them, set who can see them, create threads in them, post in them, manage them, make threads sticky, lock threads, subscribe to threads, add to post count… and you can change everything about the forums (and everything else, don't forget), so if you don't care much for the default layout you can go right in and edit them to how you do want them.

This short introduction doesn't even begin to cover what you could possibly do. The only real way to discover everything is by creating a site and seeing for you yourself! Seeing is believing!

We're like a bouncer keeping the bad stuff out

Your data is safe. All passwords are stored as a one-way hash into our secure, access-only, database server. A site creator has 100% access to their own sites—no one can attempt to lock you out, delete you, or remove your access. As a site creator you also have access to portions of the admin control panel that others can never access, just to ensure nothing bad can happen.

Vigorous security checks. Any potentially dangerous aspects entering the database is vigourously checked to ensure nothing bad will ever happen to your data. Forum posts and mail messages are generated using our advanced parser, removing all XSS possibilities.

Ooops! I didn't mean to do that! Not to worry. Nothing is really ever deleted from the database, so if you deleted a page, a user, a forum, or pretty much anything, we can quickly go back in a rectify the situation!

Introducing the admin control panel

The admin control panel is the place where you need to head to update stuff and do things. Whether it be to change a typo, accept a member, or insert a new row into your database, each page is intuitive and only ever a couple clicks away. Below are a few screenshots displaying the simplicity and power of the AcornRack system.