ChaseSagum.com » elgg http://chasesagum.com An Open Source Way of Life! Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:13:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=1642 My 5 Goals for 2010 http://chasesagum.com/my-5-goals-for-2010 http://chasesagum.com/my-5-goals-for-2010#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:00:55 +0000 Chase http://chasesagum.com/?p=1064

I thought I would take some time and share with you my 5 main goals with my blog this next year. I’m mentioning them now because I wanted to get a head start on my goals, so i’m starting in October. They are pretty simple goals, but are sure to involve quite a bit of work on my end. Here they are.

1. Drupal As A Powerful Blog CMS

We all know that Drupal is a powerful content management system. But many don’t consider it a powerful CMS for professional blogging. Most still consider WordPress the only player in that market. Through various tutorials and concept articles I hope to help people learn how to leverage the Drupal open source CMS for blogging because of the vast amount of things it can do.

Although I don’t use Drupal for this blog, I do use it for many others and am absolutely loving it!

2. Fedora A Better Operating System For Your Desktop

I have had such a good experience using the Fedora Linux Distribution and I really plan on helping other people have the same. Everyone talks about the Mac OS and Windows 7 or vista. But people are still largly underestimating the Fedora operating system and how cool it really is.

Even though I mostly cover web applications when it comes to Open Source, I do plan on exanding into the topic of the Linux Desktop and covering various tutorials and reviews of Fedora stuff.

3. Elgg Is An Amazing Social Network Platform

I still don’t get the sense from being around the web (and I mean all over) that people understand how amazing the Elgg open souce social network platform really is. The platform itself in my opinion is better than any other major social network. And you can literally have your own social network ready to go within a couple hours.

I plan on informing more people about the power of Elgg and covering various tutorials and extension reviews.

4. Finding The Best Lightweight Open Source Shopping Cart

There are so many open source ecommerce platforms on the web today. But I am in search for the best lightweight one. Not just because somebody said so. But through trial and error. Through lots of testing. And most importantly through personal experience I would like to find that “right one”.

I guess you can say that i’m looking for the “wordpress” of the ecommerce world. I’ll be covering tutorials & reviews for all the ecommerce platformst to find what i’m looking for.

5. Open Source and Microblogging are a Perfect Fit

Right now it’s considered an “unconventional use” to use WordPress as a microblog. I hope to help change that. WordPress can be leveraged to be a self-hosted “personal twitter” and I plan on creating a few tutorials to help people create this.

Also covering Status.net, the open source microblogging platform. I plan on covering this open source app often to help people create their very own mult-user microblogging services. I think there is a huge potential for this.

]]> http://chasesagum.com/my-5-goals-for-2010/feed 3 10 Elgg Plugins That Work & Are Effective! http://chasesagum.com/10-elgg-plugins-that-work-are-effective http://chasesagum.com/10-elgg-plugins-that-work-are-effective#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:07:40 +0000 Chase http://chasesagum.com/?p=903

There are many Elgg plugins to help you add additional functionality to your Elgg core. The idea of this post was not to put together “the best” list of Elgg plugins, only it’s a list of 10 Elgg Plugins that I have found to be extremely useful. I have used and tested each of these plugins with the most recent version of Elgg which at this time is Elgg 1.1. All have installed and worked perfectly and have been a great advantage to the Social Networks I have used them with. I hope they will do the same for you!

1. Default Widgets

This plugin gives you the ability through a web interface to control the default widgets for new users profile and dashboard. This is an extremely helpful plugin because you can’t always assume that your users will know how to customize their profile & dashboard pages. (even though it’s quite easy).  Default Widgets

2. Custom Index

Most likely you are going to want to customize the homepage of your social network. This Elgg plugin gives you an easy way to do that wihtout totally hacking your Elgg platform. The author includes some demo code to help you in creating your custom homepage as well. Custom Index

3. Invite Friends

Kind of surprised this is not a in the Elgg core by now. Anyhow you will definitely want this plugin. Gives your users a new option where they can send out mass invites along with a message for the email to invite more to the social network. Invite Friends

4. Friend Requests

By default with Elgg (as of the date of this post) the friends functionality does not quite work the same as your typical social network. You can add users as your friends without their approval. Many people don’t like this part of the Elgg framework. This Elgg plugin gives users the ability to moderate who their friends are. Friend Requests

5. User Validation

This Elgg plugin gives site administrators the ability to moderate users as they come in/register. In some cases you may want to limit or control what the users that come into your social network. Kind of like a private social network of some kind. That’s where this plugin would come in helpful for you. UserValidation

6. Form & Related Plugins/ Flexprofile

The Flexprofile plugin gives you a web interface to control the Profile Fields for your users. This is another bit of functionality that should be in the Elgg core. I use this often to actually add additional fields to users Profile so they can give more information about themselves. Flexprofile

7. Embed Video

A widget for users profile pages so that they can embed a YouTube (and other types) video of their choice. If you are going to have a social network you have to give your users video capabilities. And what better than pulling YouTube video over.  Embed Video

8. TidyPics Photo Gallery

There’s a file functionality built in already with Elgg where you can upload files. But this particular plugin is more specific to uploading & sharing photos and creating photo albums and galleries. TidyPics Photo Gallery

9.  Higher Walls

This plugin for Elgg hides your entire social network to the public. So by combining this plugin along with the UserValidation plugin you can create a private social network. Higher Walls

10. Twitter Widget

Need I explain the reason to have Twitter integrated within your social network? Well with that aside let me expalain this simple Elgg plugin. It basically takes a users Twitter Feed and displays X ammount of hte most recent “Twits” on the users Profile page. Twitter Widget

]]> http://chasesagum.com/10-elgg-plugins-that-work-are-effective/feed 4 Open Source Social Networking Platform – Elgg http://chasesagum.com/open-source-social-networking-platform-elgg http://chasesagum.com/open-source-social-networking-platform-elgg#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:17:27 +0000 Chase http://chasesagum.com/?p=281

I wanted to take some time and revisit the open source social networking platform Elgg. This is one the coolest open source projects out there and is still not talked about enough. I still hear stories about people building social networking platforms on their own from scratch. It doesn’t make too much sense to me when you can utilize such a great tool such as Elgg. I’m accomplishing two tasks at once here, because I have a few people that are requesting some information from me concerning building a social network.

Elgg 1.0 requires a system running PHP 5.2+ as an Apache mod (not in CGI mode or safe mode) with GD extensions, MySQL 5+ and a version of the Apache web server with mod_rewrite installed. OpenSocial requires Mcrypt; Elgg 1.1 SOAP extensions will require the PHP SOAP library. You don’t have to have the OpenSocial side of the application if you don’t want to. But it is certiantly a positive. The OpenSocial part is the OpenID part allowing your users to integrate their logins with other social networking websites. Here is the basic features rundown of Elgg:

  • Blogging
  • Social networking
  • File repositories for individuals and communities
  • Podcast support
  • Full access controls
  • Supports tagging
  • User profiles
  • Full RSS support
  • RSS aggregator
  • Create communities
  • Collaborative community blogs
  • Create ‘friends’ networks
  • Import content
  • Publish to blog
  • Multilingual
  • Branding/customisation
  • OpenID support

From there you can basically understand the core of what Elgg gives you and where your imagination can take over. I have built a few websites in Elgg along with my team of developers and we all agree that Elgg was very easy to customize to our needs. Last year I built two websites that are running Elgg:

Since the last time I wrote about Elgg the community has grown tremendously and so has the code. Many more plugins have been contributed to the project, giving Elgg much more power and ability for your social network. I wanted to take the time and highlight a few plugins of interest.

  1. Media Gallery - this plugin gives the admin the abililty to post flash videos using the jeroenwijering.com flash media player.
  2. Advertiser - Allows you to run ads on your elgg site.
  3. Profile Comment Wall Widget - This is similar to the comment wall on Facebook. Very important for social networking sites.
  4. Bookmarks - This gives your social network some Delicious type functionailty. Your users can save, import, and export their bookmarks.
  5. Vanilla Forum - If you need a forum integrated into your social network than this Is what you want.
  6. Chat Integration - This uses the PhpFreeChat to integrate an Ajax chat system into your social network.
  7. Invitation List - Adds a menu item to the ‘Your Network’ page, called ‘Open invitations’. It lists all invitations sent out by the current user or all invitations if the user is an admin) and offers the option to delete, resend or edit them. This is really important because if you send out an invitation, and they don’t get it for some reason, you need to be able to know that and correct the problem.
  8. Notify - Adds a template keyword {{notifications}} that shows whether a user has pending friend requests and membership invitations.
  9. Module Manager - Self explanatory. Same idea as your plugins manager in WordPress.
  10. Statistics - Admins and users can view statistics of all kinds. For admins is for all content and users. And for users content posted by him or her.

I hope this article has been helpful for you in learning more about the open source Elgg social network platform. I think many can benefit greatly from this application if they plan properly and use it accordingly. I have to admit that I have not used it nearly as much as I would have liked. But as you can see the posibilities are pretty endless with this platform.

]]> http://chasesagum.com/open-source-social-networking-platform-elgg/feed 2 Make Your Own Facebook! http://chasesagum.com/make-your-own-facebook http://chasesagum.com/make-your-own-facebook#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:18:02 +0000 Chase http://chasesagum.com/make-your-own-facebook

Are you trying to build your own social network? Are you at least contemplating the idea in your mind? Than you are looking for Elgg- the open source social network platform. It’s open source, which means it free and customizable. It also means that it gives you a solid foundation to work off of. Elgg supports a variety of different plugins that you will find helpful such as the “Open ID” plugin which essentially gives your social network Open ID support. The invitation tool works like a charm with Elgg, giving your social network the physical capability to spread like a “virus” to many many users. I must say that I recommend Elgg to all as it has worked so well for me and my personal project Realedin.com – a real estate social network.

Fresh out of the box Elgg contains these fundamental facebook like features:

  • Find and make friends
  • create communities
  • upload photos
  • Your Profile Page

With some additional features of course:

  • Your own blog
  • RSS Reader

There are a few plugins I suggest as well. These plugins have worked very well for me in my projects:

  • Bookmark tool
  • Private Messages
  • Suggestions Tool

And my final thought to round it all up. Many people have been throwing up Myspace Clone’s for the past couple of years now to build their own social networks. I cannot emphasize how big of a waste of time that is. Elgg is built on such a better foundation than Myspace ever was. Plus it has more features. Due to the fact that it’s a major open source project you will see exponential growth in the system in the months to come. So if you are serious about creating a social network of your own, than use Elgg. If you are not, and are looking for a stupid quick fix than go ahead and do a Myspace clone like everybody else.

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]]> http://chasesagum.com/make-your-own-facebook/feed 23 Open Source Social Networking Platform http://chasesagum.com/open-source-social-networking-platform http://chasesagum.com/open-source-social-networking-platform#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:05:14 +0000 Chase http://chasesagum.com/open-source-social-networking-platform

Over this past weekend I played with the open source social networking platform Elgg. I set it up on elgg.chasesagum.com for testing to see how well the installation worked and to test out it’s features. I must say that it works great and the installation went smoothly. If you are looking at building a social networking platform for some reason, maybe for your business or maybe as a business venture in and of itself, I recommend Elgg open source. It has a slick interface that looks better than MySpace ever will and it’s of course open source which makes it even better. Here are some of the features mentioned on their site;

  1. Blogging
  2. Social Networking
  3. File repositories for individuals and communities
  4. Podcast support
  5. Full access controls
  6. Supports tagging
  7. User profiles
  8. Full RSS support
  9. Rss aggregator
  10. Create Communities
  11. Collaborative community blogs
  12. Create ‘friends’ networks
  13. Import content
  14. Publish to blog
  15. Multilingual
  16. Branding/customization
  17. OpenID support

Some of you may be asking yourself, “why run my own social network?”. Especially when you already have Linkedin or MySpace. Here is what Elgg had to say in response to this question;

“For organisations concerned about their data but still wanting to harness the power of social network, you can. The ability to customize and brand your network exactly how you want. Connect together networks to create a truly distributed, global network of sites – the way the Internet should be! You can develop specific functionality to suit your needs. Even thought MySpace is too big to be useful? Create specialised, targeted networks instead!”

This could potentially be a huge benefit to several business models. The first i’m thinking of for example is Real Estate agents and brokers. An entire social network of real estate agents and brokers that can communicate with each other and collaborate and teach each other. Not to mention share leads internationally. Just a thoughts. Be sure to go to www.elgg.org to download this terrific open source social networking tool.

]]> http://chasesagum.com/open-source-social-networking-platform/feed 8 New Release: Elgg 0.9 http://chasesagum.com/new-release-elgg-09 http://chasesagum.com/new-release-elgg-09#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:27:34 +0000 Chase http://chasesagum.com/new-release-elgg-09

Elgg 0.9 has recently released becoming Elgg’s first community release. This is big news for those involved in the elgg community because it shows great community growth and involvement in the project. The new release has some improvements in the installer which was one of the most needed improvements for the system. It also includes a few new features like a comment wall which was a much needed feature, making the system more “facebook like”.

For the administrators of Elgg sites you will notice a more simplistic approach to accessing the administration area than before. Before you had to go to your _elggadmin folder with a separate username and password to access the site wide administration features. That is all included into your “news” login for your site. For you developers out there, the file structure has been better thought out and simplified. Go check it out and download the new version of Elgg – the open source social networking platform.

]]> http://chasesagum.com/new-release-elgg-09/feed 0 Get On Board With Social Networks http://chasesagum.com/get-on-board-with-social-networks http://chasesagum.com/get-on-board-with-social-networks#comments Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:31:40 +0000 Chase http://chasesagum.com/get-on-board-with-social-networks

If you have not already “got on board” with social networks for your business it’s still not too late. However there will be a day in the future when it is. So don’t wait too long! It does not matter if you are an Internet Marketer like myself, construction worker, or a hair stylist. If you are a business owner and want to better promote your business on the web then you need to strongly consider Social Networks! I’m not just talking about Facebook or Myspace. I’m talking about industry specific social communities where people gather to discuss and share information regarding particular topics. There should be a social network especially for Real Estate Professionals! There should be a social network just for construction professionals. And on and on!

So here is my recommendation to you. Find a social network that exists that is tailored to the specific industry that you are in and join it. Be an active community member. If there is not one already, then create one yourself and do good to the cause! Don’t try to reinvent the wheel in an industry that you don’t know very well. But if there happens to not be a social community for your industry, then ask your web professional how you can go about building your own. You can build your own custom application using the open source tools such as Elgg or Dolphin. Or you can use Ning which is like Blogger for social networks.

Social Networks (in case you don’t already understand the need) can be a very effective tool for your small business. Social Networks have a way of creating better interaction between the Consumer and the Producer. They create new avenues of networks and people that business owners never before thought they had. Through social networks you can:

  • Advertise your company services/products
  • Show off your portfolio
  • Share your professional profile
  • Share bookmarks of helpful resources

And many many more. You should also join Linkedin which is a general business profile social network that will also help you build your small business network. I recommend that as well as it has worked well for me. Being active in a social community will build more web traffic, build more branding, and open your business “doors” to a larger community altogether.

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