Elgg: a powerful social engine

Elgg empowers individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social environment.

Elgg, started in 2004, is an open source social engine which powers all kinds of social environments - from education to business and sports such as rugby. If you are looking to create your own social application or want to build and run a site for your organisation, Elgg is a great choice as it provides the building blocks you will need.

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As well as a robust and extensible core engine, there are a collection of features you can use to get going.

Activity

A useful activity stream which provides an at-a-glance look at activity from across the site, as well as your friends' activity and your own actions.

You can filter the activity stream to only include particular tools or types of action, making this a powerful addition to your social network.

Optionally, your activity stream can be the first port of call for users logging into the site - or you can use it alongside Elgg's widget-based dashboard. Users will be presented with the site's newest members and can post directly to the wire.


Profile

Elgg comes with a set of default profile fields which can be extended or completely changed by the site administrator.

Using Elgg's powerful widget framework, users can select from a bank of available widgets to create a full and rich profile.

An Elgg profile acts as a great overview of a site member, pulling together their activity from the site, as well as from external sources.




Notifications

You can keep track of what your friends are doing through the notification method of your choice. Choose whose activity you want to subscribe to, and have it delivered using the notification method of your choice. Email and internal messaging are supporting out of the box, and further methods can be added via plugins.


Groups

Users can create groups around a particular topic and take advantage of a collaborative group discussion area, group files and group pages. You can create open groups that anyone can join, and closed groups, where membership is requested first and accepted or denied by the group owner.


Blog

A simple blogging tool with some useful features:

* Save a draft (with autosave)
* Categories
* Conversation toggle
* Preview
* Rich media embedding (see below)





Embed files

The embed files feature allows users to easily include their photos, audio snippets and files within blog posts, pages, comments, discussion topic and profile fields.

The modal window allows your users to upload resources and get access to the files they need while constructing their content.


Files

Elgg comes equipped with a full file repository that will handle a wide variety of data including photos, word documents, audio files, videos, PDFs and more. You can easily flip between lists of files and image galleries, in order to comfortably find the item you're looking for.

Users can display their latest files on their profile and - using the media embed tool - embed any file into their content.




Microblogging

The wire plugin brings microblogging to Elgg - like having your own personal Twitter service.

You can push wire posts out to Twitter so your users can localise usage while still taking advantage of their Twitter account - or you can deploy this to your intranet in order to allow your employees to keep up to date with their colleagues' current status.




Pages

The pages plugin allows you to save and store hierarchically-organized pages of text, and control who can read and write to them. This means that you can collaboratively create a set of documents with a loose collection of people, participate in a writing process with a formal group, or simply use the functionality to write a document that only you can see, and only choose to share it once it's done.
External pages

External pages is a simple way for site admins to populate the About, Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy pages for their Elgg powered site. If used with the custom index plugin, it is possible to add frontpage content from an easy to manage WYSIWYG editor.
Dashboard

Elgg ships with a flexible user dashboard, which can be replaced by the activity view if required. The dashboard acts as a user's personal portal to the site, displaying information - both from the site and external sources - that they select.
Social bookmarking

Elgg provides users with a simple social bookmarking tool. Using a button that users can place on their browser toolbar, it is easy to bookmark and share resources from all over the web.
Categories

The site administrator can set site-wide categories. These categories are then available for users to use when creating a new blog post, uploading files or constructing pages. A great way to provide some loose structure.
Access

Elgg has always had powerful, granular, access controls for users. For Elgg 1.5 there are two new additions. Users can restrict their content to be only read by people they mark as a friend from any tool in the site. We've also introduced a a user-defined default setting (providing administrators allow users to set one) that will apply to all their content.
Other goodness

Each Elgg site can take advantage of granular RSS, FOAF, an extensible RESTful API with results in JSON, serialised PHP or XML, alternate views on a site which allow for easily creating rich mobile applications and powerful event, plugin and widget APIs.