Aug
18th
by
Ben Werdmuller

Elgg is designed for social networking

Posted in elgg | 23 comments

elgg, architecture, social networking, design

Elgg 1.0 has officially left the building. As we've already announced, it comes in two flavours: a full version with lots of features pre-installed, and a core designed for you to build your own social networking application on top of.

The archive for the full version is 1.43Mb - small enough to fit on a floppy disk, if anyone still used them. The core-only archive weighs in at less than 700k. Elgg is fully-featured and extremely powerful both to run as a stand-alone social network and as a basis for programming on top of. So why is it so small?

Elgg was founded in 2004, and - as is common with open source projects - we slowly released software with version numbers from 0.1 through to 0.9 over a period of three years. This was an evolution of the same codebase, and as we came up with new ideas and learned new lessons, we churned the code back into the core. We could have continued to do the same, but the feature list and what we wanted to do was so different by the end of last year that we made a brave decision: we rewrote from scratch.

Because of that, we could incorporate everything that was important to Elgg - granular access permissions, cross-site tagging, an emphasis on personal ownership - while adding an extremely consistent API layer, an internal event system unmatched in any web application, and extra functionality that we think is necessary to power the next generation of social applications, right into the core. While many applications take a simple beginning and try and duct tape social networking and next-gen features over the top, we started again. And as a result, Elgg is fast, flexible, extensible and ready to power the next evolution of social technology. It's not just the most popular open source social networking platform; we believe it's the best.

There's been a lot of talk about open source social networking recently, and a lot of you are doubtless wondering what makes Elgg different. The answer is this: Elgg has been designed, from the first line of code to the last, to be a flexible social network. It's not an organic evolution or a grass-roots development; it's architecture, and we're extremely proud of it.

At its heart is user control. Over the next few years, the explosion in niche social networks, and otherwise socially-enabled websites, will lead to new technologies that will allow you to federate your connections all over the Internet. This presents new opportunities for exciting new applications, but as I recently discussed with Demo.com, it also opens new opportunities for your data to be abused. Therefore, you need to control exactly what is released, and to whom. That's the core principle in Elgg.

We're very proud to have released Elgg 1.0, but this is only the beginning. Watch this space.

Antracit about 93 days ago

Thank!
I'm #1 downloading from source forge! Test will start ASAP.

Arjan about 93 days ago

Earlier today I had to unpack the tar file to believe it was complete after an extreme fast download, and now I'm reading it even fits on a floppy disk. Nice! :-)

Paul about 93 days ago

Great, but who tells me where from the name ELGG took hold ?

I searched in Wiki but there are nothing about name.

Nuno Monteiro about 93 days ago

i will take it to my uni!

this will be my project in marketing course. www.iscapianos.net ;) soon...

great job.

Lozbo about 93 days ago

Paul I just saw that on the Wiki, it is named after a city in Switzerland. I can't wait to try it out, actually if anyone would be so nice to answer me this question it will save me a lot of time

Lozbo about 93 days ago

Ups, forgot the question itself :$

I want to build a community and the most important feature is that of an advanced user profile customization (new customizable fields) and of course the ability to search for users using all or just some given fields...

Can I do this with Elgg? Can I do this out of the box? Do I need lots of plugins or tweaking the code?

Javier Burón about 93 days ago

Congratulation!!!

I'm going to test it now ;)

csplanet about 93 days ago

Good work !
Small is good. Please keep it small.

JasRandal about 93 days ago

I don't suppose it's already available in Portuguese?

Elzo about 93 days ago

Super, downloaded and ran offline - works well. Should be great when the community builds around it.

David Mackey about 93 days ago

Excited to see what you guys have in store. Hoping to bridge Elgg with SWCMS (Pligg fork).

Karim about 92 days ago

many thanks for that great script... looking forward to new plugins, themes & more .... all the best!!!

wayahead about 92 days ago

none of my host providers have advanced enough servers to run it

Emma about 92 days ago

Where can I download the old version?

Lozbo about 92 days ago

Why would you do such thing? http://classic.elgg.org/ but I think everyone around here will encourage you to use the latest version.

Eric Carmichael about 92 days ago

Where's IRC?

Sean about 92 days ago

A fantatsic release, I'm really enjoying setting it up today.

One thing that i'm missing is the RSS Feed aggregation - don't suppose we could have a simple RSS Feed reader widget?

Great work guys!

Dave about 92 days ago

@sean - I will release a very simple reader based on Google Feeds API in a day or two. It will provide a good starting point if someone would like to enhance it.

Sean about 92 days ago

@dave - you legend, thanks!

deBaer about 92 days ago

Testing elgg 1.0 now, seems really cool compared to 0.9.2, but avatar upload doesn't work and doesn't give any error messages on where to fix it.

Also, I'm really missing the German translation, and I couldn't find any information on whether someone's workng on it or if I have to do it myself...

Continue the great work!

Lozbo about 92 days ago

Emma I once experienced something similar with a project I was working (no CMS though) but it had to do with the hosting provider, I was hosting with goDaddy, I've had very bad experiences with them. Where are you hosting?

Dave, any hint at when will an advanced - customizable user profile widget will come out? I've tried to tweak a bit the current mod/profile/start.php and I have only to add one line of code to add a field, but I would like advanced options such as profile types (each type of profile would have a different set of fields) or even conditional fields that appear only if you select certain options.

And of course, to enable users to perform searches based on the customized fields is a must for me!

km about 51 days ago

Will Elgg social networking system includes in cpanel fantastico installation pack in the future. This might ease a lot of webmaster to install Elgg platform on their server

drtech about 43 days ago

That would be a great idea! I use Fantastico for my Wordpress installations and Moodle - I would love an easy way to install and upgrade Elgg?

Please note that support requests will be deleted. If you are looking for the Elgg community mailing lists, you can find them linked from http://elgg.org

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