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".
Chapter 1 covers the basics of social networking, runs over some popular social networks and goes through some of the features that are essential to online social networking. It introduces Elgg, and highlights some of the benefits of deploying one's own social network.
In Chapter 2 we use publicly accessible Elgg-installations like Ubuntero.org, the upcoming network of Ubuntu users, developers, and fans and the Elgg.org website itself as examples, to see the screens and options first-hand. After reading through the chapter, you should have a fairly good idea of what your very own Elgg-based social network will be able to do.
Chapter 3 deals with the users. We discuss several ways of inviting users to join the network, some of which can be used by ordinary users, while others are only for administrators. You'll learn to connect with other users on the network. We also run through Elgg's built-in mechanisms for attracting visitors to join the network. In between, we cover various account settings that a user can alter. After reading this chapter, you should have no trouble adding, managing or connecting to members in your Elgg network.
Chapter 4 covers one of the most exciting features—blogs. It will help you deal with abusive and off-topic content. You will learn to share video files, PDFs, images, and podcasts.
Chapter 5 Social networking is all about communities. This chapter will teach you to create communities, manage them, and manage the content in communities.
Chapter 6 You don't want your site to look like any other. It should have a unique style of its own. What better way to make this happen than using theming engines? This chapter will teach you all about themes. By the time you are through with this chapter, you will be able to create a unique theme for your site.
Chapter 7 covers some of the important Elgg plug-ins that’ll give you better control in administering your site.
Appendix A deals with installing Elgg in the popular LAMP web application environment of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Since Apache, MySQL, and PHP can also run under a Windows operating system, you can also set up Elgg to serve your purpose in a "WAMP" environment, and this appendix covers this too.
Appendix B is a list of case studies that will help you relate to popular real-world networking sites that use Elgg.
This book is aimed at people interested in social networking and e-learning teachers.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles of code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EgrfmSm0NWs"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EgrfmSm0NWs" type="application/x-
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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