BLOGSAVVY

This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how - in 2005 / 2006 - you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff!

Elgg is a powerful open source social networking application which uses blogs as the foundation of the the system and does it in a very interesting way.

What makes Elgg stand out from pretty much all the other implementations in this series is that it, by default, relys strongly on FOAF and the contextual positioning of the user in the community. Think of it as being a bit like your own LiveJournal environemnt that’s easy as heck to install and quite possibly a fair bit more simple to run.

Once a user is logged into an Elgg installation they are have the capacity to add (and remove) any number of other users as Friends and share / not share alls orts of different material, files and more with them. Obviously they also have a pretty solid blogging platform with plentiful themes to choose from, simple and straightforward posting systems and a refreshingly simple commenting system. Heck you can go and try it out for yourself at Apcala or Elgg.net… why dontcha?

At this point it’s also well worth noting that at the moment Dave and Ben are offering free hosting / implementation to people wanting to experiement / use Elgg!

Of course, at 0.2 (0.3 coming later in September), it’s fairly immature, but at the same time it’s extremely robust. Areas that could be improved upon include ‘master’ admin options and settings, blog formatting and file inclusion facilities and there’s always the challenge of only having a limited control over the blog design that is shared by many ‘inclusive’ blogging systems. However, especially if you’re coming at this from an educational perspective - it’s subtitled appropriately ‘a learning landscape’ - are fond of social networking and FOAF applications and would like an inclusive system with a heck of a lot of potential… then you could do a lot worse than having a run at this.

Download Elgg from Sourceforge or get in touch with the men behind it.

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 3:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.