Social networking giants like Facebook and MySpace have become extremely
popular today. And enterprises have realized the potential of social media and
started to deploy social networking tools for their internal usage. Social media
tools like blogs, wikis, forums, etc. have already made a headway into the
intranets of enterprises. Many organizations having e-commerce businesses use
social networking tools to develop specific communities on their sites to create
a loyal customer base. Elgg is one such social networking tool that can be used
to create a full fledged social networking website to be run publicly or within
an enterprise.
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Applies To: IT Managers Price: Free USP: Impressive feature list and advanced administration controls Primary Link: www.elgg.org Keywords: Elgg Keywords: Labs\Developer |
About Elgg
Elgg is an open source social networking framework that provides the
functionality to create fully-featured social networking websites. It allows
users to be at the center of their activities from where they can collaborate,
share and communicate with other users. Elgg comes with an impressive feature
set in the form of plugins. These plugins offer various social networking
functionalities like blog, bookmarking, tagging, message board, activity
tracking, notifications, etc. The administration control panel of a site created
with Elgg is easy, and has a very advanced user management and administration
control panel.
The administrator can easily setup the default user profile by dragging and
dropping the widgets and filling out the information. Upon logging in, a user
can also change and even add new widgets to his profile, thus providing users
with customization privileges.
Elgg comes as a package of social networking tools, instead of having a
collection of different social networking solutions for blogging, wiki, etc.
Elgg can be used to create a complete social networking website with multiple
view support feature which allows the content to be viewed on mobile
applications as well as traditional web browsers.
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Getting started
To run an Elgg based site, you require a combination of Apache Web server,
MySQL as its database server, and PHP. With this month's DVD, we have provided
the latest version of Elgg . Since a combination of Apache, MySQL and PHP is
needed to run Elgg, the DVD also contains WAMPServer, which is a single
installation package for Apache, MySQL and PHP, thus providing simpler and easy
administration of all these three prerequisites.
There are few requirements that need to be met before starting the Elgg
installation. One, the Apache Web server needs to be installed with mod_rewrite
and PHP 5 modules and MySQL should be of version 5 or later. You also need PHP
5.2 or later. With this latest release of WAMPServer, we are able to meet all
these requisites. First by installing WAMPServer, we will have Apache 2.2, MySQL
5.1 and PHP 5.2 versions installed, which will satisfy the Elgg requirements to
run. Now before starting the Elgg installation, we have to add the rewrite and
PHP5 module to Apache web server. To add these modules, click on the system tray
icon of WAMPServer. And from the menu, select Apache and then from the sub-menu,
select Apache modules. A list of available modules will be shown.By scrolling
down, select the 'rewrite_module' and 'php5 module' from the list.
Installing Elgg
Once we have setup the Web server and added the required modules, we can
proceed with Elgg installation. Elgg comes as a zipped package, so if you want
to install Elgg in your root domain, just extract the content of the Elgg zipped
folder into the document root directory of the web server (in our case into the
www directory of the Apache web server).
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Besides, if you want to have a social networking facility added to your
existing site, you can then add the extracted Elgg folder as a subdirectory to
the root domain. In our case, we will install Elgg on a local Web server, and
will keep it as a subdirectory. We will extract the Elgg folder and upload the
content of that folder into a folder named 'elgg' in the www directory of the
Apache web server. Thus the URL will be of the form like:
http://localhost/elgg.
Elgg provides a feature of file sharing whereby users can upload files and
share them across other users on the board. For this, Elgg requires a separate
folder to be created where such uploaded files, their thumbnails and also the
profile icons will be stored. Create a folder named as 'data' outside of the
document root folder where you have installed Elgg. And once the folder has been
created, make sure that you have enabled the write permission to it.
Now using WAMServer's phpMyAdmin, we'll create a new database for Elgg and
name it as 'elgg'. Also we'll have to create a new user 'elgg' that will have
administrative privileges for the database 'elgg'. This database name, username
and password will be required by the installer while going through the Elgg
installation process.
Setting up Elgg
Once the initial steps have been performed, you can visit your Elgg site on
the web browser. Going to http://localhost/elgg will open up final installation
process, through which you can now configure Elgg to be your own social
networking website. After providing the database details in the welcome page,
you will be prompted for the system settings on the next page. Here you can
provide a name for your website, also you'll have to provide the path of the
directory where the uploaded files will be stored. Now from the following setup
page, you can create a administrator for the website. Once the administrator
logs in from the Tools Administration, he can enable and configure various
plugins that will be installed for the website, like blogging, bookmarking, etc.
Once the plugins are installed, the default page for the website can be
configured by simple drag and drop of widgets.
Elgg can not only be used as an internal social networking site for
enterprise usage, but can also be used by companies with e-commerce websites.
Adding a social networking facility to their existing website will enable them
to have a platform where they can create user communities for their products and
interact with their users.