Elgg
Elgg, started in 2004, is an open source social engine which powers all kinds of social environments - from education and business to martial arts and rugby. If you are looking for a professional social intranet or want to run a site for your organisation, Elgg is a great choice.
To see some of Elgg's powerful features, read below.
Core team
Community participationThanks to the Elgg community for their contributions, suggestions, and support of Elgg. Thanks to everyone who is taking the time to contribute plugins, themes and patches.
Voted best open source social networking platform 2008. |
Advisors
Elgg is a Curverider project. |
ActivityNew to Elgg 1.5 is a comprehensive activity stream which provides an at-a-glance look at activity from across the site, as well as your friends' activity and your own actions. You can filter the activity stream to only include particular tools or types of action, making this a powerful addition to your social network. Optionally, your activity stream can be the first port of call for users logging into the site - or you can use it alongside Elgg's widget-based dashboard. Users will be presented with the site's newest members and can post directly to the wire. |
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Profile
Using Elgg's powerful widget framework, users can select from a bank of available widgets to create a full and rich profile. An Elgg profile acts as a great overview of a site member, pulling together their activity from the site, as well as from external sources. |
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NotificationsYou can keep track of what your friends are doing through the notification method of your choice. Choose whose activity you want to subscribe to, and have it delivered using the notification method of your choice. Email and internal messaging are supporting out of the box, and further methods can be added via plugins. SMS notifications are available from Curverider. |
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GroupsUsers can create groups around a particular topic and take advantage of a collaborative group discussion area, group files and group pages. You can create open groups that anyone can join, and closed groups, where membership is requested first and accepted or denied by the group owner. |
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BlogElgg 1.5 has a fresh new blogging tool with some useful added features:
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Embed mediaThe new media embed feature allows users to easily include their photos, audio snippets and files within blog posts, pages, comments, discussion topic and profile fields. The modal window allows your users to upload resources and get access to the files they need while constructing their content. |
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FilesElgg comes equipped with a full file repository that will handle a wide variety of data including photos, word documents, audio files, videos, PDFs and more. You can easily flip between lists of files and image galleries, in order to comfortably find the item you're looking for. Users can display their latest files on their profile and - using the media embed tool - embed any file into their content. |
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The wireThe wire brings microblogging to the core Elgg package - like having your own personal Twitter service. Users can post to the wire via the site and SMS (through an optional extra). You can push wire posts out to Twitter so your users can localise usage while still taking advantage of their Twitter account - or you can deploy this to your intranet in order to allow your employees to keep up to date with their colleagues' current status. |
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The pages plugin allows you to save and store hierarchically-organized pages of text, and control who can read and write to them. This means that you can collaboratively create a set of documents with a loose collection of people, participate in a writing process with a formal group, or simply use the functionality to write a document that only you can see, and only choose to share it once it's done.
External pages is a simple way for site admins to populate the About, Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy pages for their Elgg powered site. If used with the custom index plugin, it is possible to add frontpage content from an easy to manage WYSIWYG editor.
Elgg ships with a flexible user dashboard, which can be replaced by the activity view if required. The dashboard acts as a user's personal portal to the site, displaying information - both from the site and external sources - that they select.
Elgg provides users with a simple social bookmarking tool. Using a button that users can place on their browser toolbar, it is easy to bookmark and share resources from all over the web.
The site administrator can set site-wide categories. These categories are then available for users to use when creating a new blog post, uploading files or constructing pages. A great way to provide some loose structure.
Elgg has always had powerful, granular, access controls for users. For Elgg 1.5 there are two new additions. Users can restrict their content to be only read by people they mark as a friend from any tool in the site. We've also introduced a a user-defined default setting (providing administrators allow users to set one) that will apply to all their content.
Each Elgg site can take advantage of granular RSS, Open Social, OpenID (client and server), FOAF, an extensible RESTful API with results in JSON, serialised PHP or XML, alternate views on a site which allow for easily creating rich mobile applications and powerful event, plugin and widget APIs.
Elgg comes with a set of default profile fields which can be extended or completely changed by the site administrator.
