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.
- Media Gallery - this plugin gives the admin the abililty to post flash videos using the jeroenwijering.com flash media player.
- Advertiser - Allows you to run ads on your elgg site.
- Profile Comment Wall Widget - This is similar to the comment wall on Facebook. Very important for social networking sites.
- Bookmarks - This gives your social network some Delicious type functionailty. Your users can save, import, and export their bookmarks.
- Vanilla Forum - If you need a forum integrated into your social network than this Is what you want.
- Chat Integration - This uses the PhpFreeChat to integrate an Ajax chat system into your social network.
- 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.
- Notify - Adds a template keyword {{notifications}} that shows whether a user has pending friend requests and membership invitations.
- Module Manager - Self explanatory. Same idea as your plugins manager in Wordpress.
- 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.
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