Tinkering Around with Elgg..

A few weeks back, our company started using a new application called Elgg. Elgg is an open source social platform aimed to provide an environment for interaction and collaboration amongst individuals. It has some nice features like: blogging, file repositories, RSS support, podcast support and of course, social networking. What I liked most about it is its "Community" feature, where in users can create communities (complete with interaction tools like blogs, forums, etc.) and people of the same interest can discuss in that space. This is especially useful in our case, since we’re in the software dev’t industry where discussions are always bound to happen. Another neat feature Elgg has is that it’s pluggable. Anyone can develop a new plugin which can be used within the application. These are a couple of the interesting plugins that are already available:

Google Search
Chat Integration (PhpFreeChat)
Twitter Integration
OpenID Client
Captcha
Upcoming Events
Draft Posts

I found the last plugin really handy. This was one of the things I found lacking when I first tried out Elgg. For the complete list of available plugins, just visit their site: elgg.org/

There are also some things that I think can still be improved though..

The "Invites" feature — it would be nice to be able to send multiple invites instead of having to click ‘Invite’ for each person you’d like to invite.
A user can have no username and Name defined, therefore when you look at the list of users.. there are people w/o names and you won’t know who they are.
Its a little hard to navigate around. Its hard to find where to set the FullName (its in Account Settings, wherein you’d first think that it is in the Your Profile page).

Anyway, these are just some of my thoughts.. Still got to play with it more =)

Posted on 02.20.08 to Tech blogs by oching. Tagged collaboration tool, community development, ELGG, social networking, social platform. Subscribe to follow comments on this post. No comments yet. Add your thoughts or trackback from your own site.