Elgg 1.8 Social Networking

Create, customize, and deploy your very own social networking site with Elgg

• An updated version of the very first book on Elgg
• Detailed and easy-to-understand analysis on building your very own social networking site with Elgg
• Explore the vast range of Elgg’s social networking capabilities including communities, sharing, profiles and relationships
• Learn to create plugins and themes with extensive tutorials
• Written by Cash Costello, a core developer of the Elgg team, with a foreword from Dave Tosh, Elgg co-founder.

In Detail

The web is becoming increasingly social as millions of people use it to blog, share, post, ‘friend’, ‘unfriend’ (which was made the Oxford word of the year in 2009), comment, and chat. Elgg – your award-winning open source social networking engine – is tailor-made to create any social networking or social media website you can imagine.

If you want to create a social networking website from scratch using Elgg, then this book is exactly what you need.

Elgg 1.8 Social Networking covers everything you need to know about building a social networking site with Elgg. It begins with instructions for installing Elgg, continues with a guided tour of its capabilities, and finishes with practical advice on deploying Elgg on a production server. And in between, it is packed with information on configuring and customizing Elgg through plugins and themes.

This book is a learn-by-doing guide to creating your own social networking site. It includes three sample case studies on how Elgg could be used as an e-learning tool, an intranet application for organizations, and a niche social networking site. Step by step it takes you through the installation, configuration, and customization of Elgg. Valuable advice is sprinkled throughout the book to enable you to build your site like an expert. For developers, this book provides a multitude of options. First, there is a tutorial-based section that systematically teaches you how to build plugins. Soon you will have ten plugins for use on your site in addition to all the knowledge you have gained. Second, if you prefer a quick overview, this book has an appendix that describes Elgg using the terminology and design patterns common in web development. Third, if you are interested in creating a theme, it also includes a design tutorial and a catalog of Elgg’s view templates. The book then goes on to describe what is involved in running a production website. It has sections on selecting a hosting provider, configuring and tuning the server, backing up the site, and dealing with spammers..

The RAW version of this book is based on Elgg v1.7. The final published book will be completely updated and based on Elgg v1.8.

What you will learn from this book

• Install your very own site using Elgg and learn to administer it.
• Customize your site using the plugins available from the Elgg plugin repository.
• Build your own plugins from scratch while following the step-by-step tutorials.
• Create your own theme by selecting recipes from the theming cookbook.
• Learn how to share content with other users.
• Deploy Elgg in a production environment with ample advice on server configuration, back-ups, site monitoring, and daily administrative tasks.
• Examine the design of Elgg from a developer’s perspective.
• Learn how you can contribute to the vibrant and ever growing Elgg community

Approach

This book provides more than just a step-by-step guide to installing and using Elgg. It includes practical advice gained through experience on what it takes to deploy and maintain an Elgg-based site. If you are a software developer or are familiar with PHP, it provides both a tutorial-based introduction and a quick reference guide so that you can quickly extend and customize Elgg.

Who this book is written for

If you want to create a social networking site using Elgg and do not have a background in software development, this book provides all the information and advice that you need written just for you. If you are a developer, it also contains valuable tutorials and reference material so that you can begin writing code right away.