Working with Elgg
Ever since the first time I saw STLPunk.com and then MySpace and more recently Facebook, I’ve always wanted to build my own Social Network, but never had a clue as to how. Now I know. I tested out the Elgg system, an open source social platform started in 2004 that powers all kinds of social environments.
After loading the file to my server and glancing over the documentation, my hope was that it would be as easy as a WordPress site or at least Drupal. But that was not the case.
The installation was not very hard, but I’ve read that a lot of people are having trouble with it. Using Steadfast as my hosting provider for my Elgg site I ran into no major issues. By the way, Steadfast is by far the best hosting service I’ve worked with, and I’ve used quite a few, but that’s another blog post.
Where the trouble for me lies is the limited number of options you have in the Administration area of the site, and the heavy reliance on PHP knowledge. Now, I know my way around PHP, but as any developer knows, if you’ve never seen the code before there will always be a learning curve. Not to mention there are 20+ folders all packed with sub-folders and hundreds of files. I’ll admit, it took me the better part of a day to really grasp what was going on.
To add Plugins and Themes, all the extra things that make sites cool, there is no admin interface install like in WordPress. It’s closer to the Drupal format, where you need to physically move the files to the correct directory, then in your admin area enable it. Not too hard so far, just tricky trying to figure out where to put things.
The only major issue I had in the whole installation/configuration process was when I tried to change the theme the first time. Like I said, I only skimmed the documentation, but I changed the ‘View’ in the Site Administration area and I lost the site. Panicked, I hit the community section of the Elgg site to find my answer. Surely I wasn’t the only idiot to do something like this. Well after nearly an hour of hunting, I found one post, Restore ‘Default View’ in site administration page, it saved me and my site is back up and running.
Another problem I’ve been having is lost emails. Now this could be a number of different problems, not just Elgg, but a few users have told me they have registered for the site but never received the confirmation email. As of now, I’m just creating the accounts for the users until I can find a better work around.
The final issue that I’ll talk about is the style sheets. I consider myself pretty versed in CSS, but for whatever reason, I’m having major trouble correcting style sheet issues. From what I understand about Elgg, there is a master CSS.php file that loads the dozens of other CSS.php files that are scattered throughout the site and plugins. I’ve found myself, rather than hunting for the code, just overriding the style to get things to work.
Now that I’ve crapped on Elgg for a while, I’d like to spend some time talking about all the good things, and there are many. Right out of the box Elgg provides many different features like Blogs, Friends, Groups, Profiles, Pages and The Wire.
Blogs, Friends and Profiles are pretty self-explanatory. With these alone you could run a pretty good site, giving every user the ability to create their own Profile page, make Friends with other users and write their own Blog.
Where I think the true power comes in is the Groups and Pages. With Groups you can, what else, create a group. And within that group, which users can join, you can create pages, blogs and post on a message board. It’s almost like building a micro-site right in your site. So if you have a site on Food, you could have a group about Fruit and Pages within that Group about different types of Fruit. It’s a really nice way to organize the vast amounts of content a Social Media site can have.
The Wire is another neat feature, but something I believe that is a requirement for all future Social Media sites. Basically, it’s a Facebook wall or a Twitter account. You can even connect your Wire to post to Twitter if you’d like, killing two birds with one stone.
All in all, I’ve been very pleased with Elgg. Although I have a lot to learn about the program, I will enjoy doing it. There is a lot more that could be said about Elgg, but I truly do not have the time or energy to write it all out, but I’m sure as my experience grows it will give me plenty more to write about.
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