Elgg: Installation and First Impressions

December 23, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

I just installed Elgg, the open source social networking platform, on our school’s shared server space. I really cannot speak to the feature set as of yet. This pertains to the nuts and bolts of installing, configuring, and customizing the site.

To begin with, automatic installation is not available through cpanel/fantastico, so a manual installation is required. This is no big deal. One begins by creating a mySQL database for Elgg on the server. Next, you need to download the software and unzip on your computer. Next, upload the Elgg folder to your server via ftp and change the permissions on a file and a directory. Point your browser to the Elgg directory and the installer appears. Fill in your database settings, passwords and email information.

With luck, you’ll have no errors and you can get to the configuration page. That wasn’t the case for me because the school web site is on a server with register_globals on. Once that was rectified, I was able to access the configuration.

I installed version 0.9 RC2, so there were a few bugs to be ironed out. It wasn’t any real big deal, but sticking to version 0.8.2 would make things simpler. That being said, most RC2 releases have been more reliable in my experience.

The configuration pages allows you to name the site and change the tagline among other settings. Of particular interest for use by schools are settings to allow or disallow public registration and invitations. Additionally, the setting Walled Garden allows you to restrict access to outsiders. You can also set it to force log-in to make comments.

If you want to customize the theme, you have a couple of options. First, you can upload a theme to the server and over-write the default theme. You can also access the theme files through “default template editor” to edit the page shell and css. This requires willingness and ability to work with some code.

The front page content is edited using the “frontpage template editor” which also involves playing with some basic html code. You don’t have to be an expert, but having a knowledge of html and css is certainly helpful. Alternatively a handy code reference book should give you enough guidance to make the modifications.

Overall, the installation and configuration is more difficult than many other scripts, in which switching themes involves a click of a button and front page content can be edited with a wysiwyg editor. It certainly is much more difficult to set up than a ning site. Support and documentation on the elgg.org site are also somewhat sparse. I wouldn’t recommend elgg to someone new to setting up websites using open source software. On the other hand, if you have some experience and are not averse to some basic troubleshooting, it’s worth a look.

The ability to install the software on our own server offers compelling reasons to look further into elgg. I’ll explore the software features in the near future and posting more information here.

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