Create Online Community with Elgg

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.

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.

Add the rewrite and PHP modules to the Apache Web server as it will be required by Elgg for execution.

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).

It shows the default profile page for a user. Through the dashboard, a user can customize the layout of his profile page.

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.