Elgg Social Networking: Create and manage your own social network site using this free open-source tool (From Technologies to Solutions) | 2008-03-28 00:00:00 | | 0 | Miscellaneous
In Detail Elgg is an open-source social web application licensed under GPL version 2, and runs on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. It offers a networking platform combining elements of blogging, e-portfolios, news feed aggregation, file sharing, and social networking. Elgg has its own plug-in architecture, and can use plug-ins to provide a calendar and a wiki. It supports a number of open standards including RSS, LDAP for authentication, FOAF, and XML-RPC for integration with most third-party blogging clients. It can be integrated with MediaWiki, Moodle, Drupal, and WebCT.
Elgg provides each user with a personal weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile, and an RSS reader. Additionally, all of a user's content can be tagged with keywords--so they can connect with other users with similar interests and create their own personal learning network. However, where Elgg differs from a regular weblog or a commercial social network (such as MySpace) is the degree of control each user is given over who can access their content. Each profile item, blog post, or uploaded file can be assigned its own access restrictions--from fully public to readable only by a particular group or individual.
Using Elgg is the easiest way to create your own fully customized, hosted social network for your business, organization, or group of friends. Elgg communities can include blogs, discussion groups, media galleries, friends' lists, and much more. Because it's open source, and has many plug-ins, Elgg can be extended in unlimited ways. Elgg lets you host your own Facebook-style social network and retain complete control over how it works. This book shows you all you need to know to create safe, fun social networks.
While anybody can use Elgg to create their social network, it is especially useful in education as it has many features making it suitable for e-learning, including groups, communities, and blogs that can be used for online classes where students can communicate in a new way with each other and with students around the world--in a managed, protected environment, creating what its authors term a `personal learning landscape`. This book also covers using Elgg in teaching/learning.
What you will learn from this book?
Get started with your Social networking site Customize your site's appearance to give it a unique styleInvite friends, create groups, and start blogsAutomate your user registrationHost photos, videos, and MP3s--enable users to comment and discuss them Use Elgg as a group podcasting platformCreate, improve, and maintain a communityProtect your network from spam
Approach
This book has a very easy-to-follow approach that will teach you how to do things with examples and lots of screenshots. As an example the book builds a community site for Linux administrators.
Who this book is written for?
This book is aimed at people interested in social networking and e-learning teachers.
User review
Waste of money & time ,,. completely useless!!!
This books is well written but completely useless. The directory structure is totally different than my install, making the tips here completely useless. None of the customizations work with my version and installation of elgg. A book on Microsoft Excel Macros would be as helpful as this @$#^&/.
Very disappointed!!!
User review
Elgg social networking book review
This book sets out to be both a user's guide and an installation and customisation guide for the Elgg social networking software. It definitely achieves both. The book begins with a useful discussion on social networking, introducing such concepts as blogs, communities, tags and friends. It follows this with a chapter devoted to a tour of Elgg, taking the reader through signing up for an account and then an introduction to personalising the new account. This chapter states it is an extended feature list of Elgg - in fact on reading this chapter alone readers will have sufficient information to make good use of Elgg. Further chapters take the reader through detailed explorations of the various features of the software. The book finishes off with case studies of a couple of Elgg installations.
The book really is in two parts, with a clear division between the two. Chapters 2 to 5 form a user manual, with chapters 6 and 7 and the first appendix telling the reader how to install and customise the software in a much more technical fashion. If using someone else's Elgg installation, the first chapters form an extremely useful guide to everything a user needs to know to get the most out of Elgg. The chapters on customisation and plug-ins are written in a similar friendly fashion to the rest of the book and the author has managed to get the technical information across very effectively. It is good to see that relevant warnings are included too.
The writing style is really good. It was nice to see that the author is not shy of criticising the software a little where needed, for example by pointing out the all-or-nothing nature of system admin roles in Elgg. The whole text is easy to understand and provides a useful reference or how-to guide for Elgg. The icing on the cake for me is that the book even showed me something new and I have been running Elgg for over two years now.
User review
Elgg Social Networking - Book Review
The book is meant to act as both an introduction to Elgg in general (it's a locally managed social network that you can build) and to getting the software up and running on a LAMP or WAMP machine. By approaching the writing in this way, Sharma does a terrific job in scaling up the technical discourse as the book progresses. For example, the first few chapters outline some of the simple social networking features (friends list, profiles, tag clouds) for people who are new to the world of social networking.
Where the text shines is in it's simple, yet effective scaffolding of difficulty as it progresses into more complicated functions of Elgg like customization of your profiles, CSS and in managing and installing plug-ins. The entire text is beautifully supported by helpful images that connect the particulars of a given passage to a concrete example.
Sharma's writing style; direct, simple and clean, really help direct the reader through the text in a way that makes the digestion of all of these potentially new and exciting ideas seem easy.
My favorite section of this book is potentially the most complex section to write about, installing the software on a local machine in order to act as a server. The world of LAMP, (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) can seem daunting to new users setting up a computer. Sharma's easy to follow text, littered with helpful illustrations makes the seemingly esoteric steps involved in setting up LAMP seem simple and manageable. Thanks for the great read! I know that when Elgg version 1.0 drops this summer, I'll have this text handy as I set up a new install to play with!
User review
The best introduction to classic Elgg
I'm the technical lead on Elgg, and have read this book through cover to cover. Independent but accurate and thorough, I absolutely endorse it as a great way to get into the product. This covers versions through 0.9x and is recommended to anyone who wants to start their own social networking site quickly and easily.
User review
do-it-yourself Web 2.0
The recent rise of the so-called Web 2.0 has been driven by the success of sites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. All of these are, thus far, closed sites, with massive IT personnel support and data centers. In contrast, what Elgg offers is a way for a single enthusiast of a hobby or subject to rev up her own social website.
Much of the book is taken up with GUI issues. Demonstrating numerous aids for quickly and easily setting up your community and administering it. It looks quite competently done, and there is not much point me going into the low level details of what is available. You should troll the book yourself to find out.
But Elgg is more than just about building a website on a machine. One nifty outreach feature it possesses is for you to search for people. Not restricted to your website. It can go to a central site, Ubuntero, and scan it. The idea here is to enable your website to be more than just a standalone node on the Internet. To be sure, this external searching is somewhat limited, from what I can discern in the text. Nice as far as it goes. However, Elgg developers might [or should] take this idea further. It doesn't have the sheer sweep of Google's search. I realise that the latter is for arbitrary searching on the Web. While the Elgg searching has a more focused objective.
