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

Building your own Social Network community is one of the most effective Organic Internet Marketing strategies today. Combining these plugins plus the core of the Elgg Open Source application you can make it easier on yourself by getting the building of your social network out of the way.

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:

• vizionboards.com
• realedin.com

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.

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 many of my personal projects.

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.

Building your own Social Network community is one of the most effective Organic Internet Marketing strategies today. It’s not easy to build the community, but at least now it’s easy to build the application thanks to the Elgg Developers.