Comments on: BuddyPress Installation for the Masses

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 14:03:07 +0000

I thought a school district in New York State was funding such, but apparently not. I think in the end they too went for a non-general approach.

Curverider has done well by giving us Elgg in the first place. To my knowledge, this is something that WP/BP lack as well. There are roles, but they are not real customizable. There have been plugins, but I haven’t had a lot of luck with them. I have been able to cobble something that works for our school in WPMu. It would seem that BP would make issues of access control yet more complex.

By: Kevin Jardine

Kevin Jardine — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 06:16:40 +0000

Sorry, that should have been “such an idea”.

By: Kevin Jardine

Kevin Jardine — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 06:15:42 +0000

On access control: no, I’m afraid Elgg still has no roles and permissions system comparable to what say Drupal has.

To be fair to Curverider, this could be done in a plugin. I’ve been pitching such the idea to my clients, hoping that one of them would fund the development of such a system. However, as they all have different needs, they have all opted for quick hard-coded fixes rather for something more general.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 20:35:11 +0000

Hi Kevin–

It’s always hard to decide at which juncture to make comparisons as one or the other always seems to be on the cusp of a big change. It looks like 1.8 will go a long way toward making Elgg more friendly to the non-technically oriented.

I installed 1.7.1 a few weeks ago and I like the progress I saw.

As a person involved with K12 education granular access control is always of great interest. Any progress on that front?

I’ll keep your recommendations in mind. There is a real demand for software such as Elgg after the NING change of terms.

Great to hear from you again!

By: Kevin Jardine

Kevin Jardine — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 20:11:46 +0000

I’d wait until Elgg 1.8 (due out in October) if you can before doing a comparison. Among other things, Elgg 1.8 will make the application much more configurable by non-coders, including a point-and-click navigation setup and (hurray) an optional non-PHP keyword templating system that brings back some of the best ideas from the classic Elgg (pre 1.0) templates.