Team Elgg released their code for testing on August 8 through their Subversion repository. Naturally I grabbed the code and installed it on my server for a test run. This gave me a chance to look into the admin interface, as wells as help them identify bugs.
When the admin user logs in the view is much the same as the users’ interface with the exception of the Administration button on the navigation bar.
Once you click on the button, you are offered an overview of the site statistics and a left side menu of administrative options.
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Site administration allows to to change many of the parameters that were requested in the installation such as Site Name, paths to data, language, etc.
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The user administration Includes a link to add new users (highlighted in red), a field for a user search for users, and a list of users.
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The main administrative functions with users can be access here, or on any other page by Clicking on and individual users or by mousing over and clicking the triangle on a user’s avatar–very handy and clever.
The options in red are those that appear to administrators only. Again, these options can be accessed through the avatar on any page, not just in the Users Admin Page.
The Tool Administration allows you to enable and disable plugins or tools for the site. Enabled tools are surrounded by a green rectangle.
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By default, there are very few tools installed. Additional tools or Plugins must be installed via ftp to the elgg/mod folder before enabled through the admin interface. In my experience, most tools do not require configuration. Any configuration instructions are found in the README.txt within the plugin’s folder and done by editing code to specific files.
The final option displayed is the log browser, which was actually a tool that I enabled. This allows the admin to view any events that have ocurred giving options for filter display by users and by time periods by clicking “Refine results.”
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Other administrative changes appear to be configured by editing the code. For example, the spotlight area at the bottom of each page is altered by editing elgg/views/default/spotlight/default.php (grep is your friend!).
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That’s a general overview of the Elgg 1.0 Administrative Interface. In general it works and is intuitive. Much of what you will need to do from day to day as an admin is in the graphical user interface. Some other configuration must be done by editing code. The code is well commented making editing easier, and I anticipate more documentation coming on line soon. Meanwhile, it is easy enough to find which files to edit by using grep through ssh access.
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This work by Stephen J O’Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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