The Obsessive Collaborator

A while back I wrote about the open source social networking site Elgg. When it came time to choose a new social networking site for my family, I opted not to go with Elgg, since it was going through a major code revision. I went with People Aggregator instead. People Aggregator has been ok, but it is rough in a lot of places, and way overdue for an update (as far as I can tell it has missed the last two or three milestones, as it is still on 1.2pre7). This has kept me on the lookout for a new solution, and the arrival of Elgg 1.0 has me looking hard in that direction.

The new version of Elgg is the best solution for a closed social network that I have seen so far. It was super easy to install - typical PHP/MySQL install that involved setting up a database and uploading files. I did need to manually enter some info in my apache conf since it tried to write an .htaccess file that my apache configuration was set to ignore. But that was easy to spot and within minutes I was up and running.

At first glance it is clean and simple (in the style of the old one) with a bit more AJAX and the nice large sans serif fonts associated with many web 2.0 apps.

I jumped right to my dashboard where I was able to easily edit the widgets that appeared for me on my front page.

Once populated with some content, it dynamically updates the latest activity at a glance.

Before editing too much I went to the administrative console to manage plugins. The new Elgg architecture is plugin (mod) based. It can ship with the bare minimum or a "full" set of plugins. I chose the "full" set, which in fact actually does not include all of the plugins available on the site. I needed to go to the site to get the "walled garden" plugin so that I could make the site available only to those who I wanted it. By default anyone can register. The walled garden essentially takes all information off of the front page and disables the register link. I found this "full" set a little confusing. I don't know why they can't include the walled garden by default, since you can enable/disable plugins from the administrative console if you don't want to use any of them.

Once that was done I went back to creating content. Creating a blog is easy (particularly with the TinyMCE plugin).

Uploading files is also easy. And when I uploaded pictures it recognized them as such and made an album for me.

Even for a closed site it is nice to have multiple groups and separate areas in a social networking site, and Elgg delivers there. You can create groups, with private messaging areas, forums, etc. very easily.

I found a few things a bit confusing in Elgg. Like the fact that friendship can be asymmetric, that is once you friend someone that doesn't mean that you are their friend. That needs to be done separately. Once you have a friend you can send them messages like in most other systems.

I also found the status updating a little confusing. I thought this would be in my profile by default but you need to add it separately as a widget. Then you need to understand that it is editable via nifty AJAX even though it looks static.

Other things that weren't well in Elggville were the access control methods. There were some confusing things about what "private" means in different contexts. And I would occasionally get some errors posting information when the settings weren't allowed.

In the end Elgg is excellent, but I have a few reservations about where it is going. Is it going to be a bare bones social network that you are supposed to build on? What will the commercial Elgg be?

These questions will likely be answered soon, but I think that Elgg is very promising, and I'd probably even choose it now as my number 1 choice for a closed social network.

I've long been waiting for the update to the open source Alfresco. The original product was a very competent document management system. Then late last year they add a new social/collaborative interface to the open source "community" edition. This version was a little rough around the edges interface-wise, but it added things like blogs, wikis, and discussions.

A new version "3.0" was set as a milestone release that would full integrate these features, and a beta of that version was released under what is now known as "Alfresco Labs". From what I can tell, Alfresco Labs is the open source releases of Alfresco (there is also an Enterprise release scheduled for this fall).

Before I get into the details of Alfresco Labs 3.0a, I have to say that it took me some time to wade through the many versions and interfaces even though I've followed Alfresco for some time. It seems like the new version actually comes with two interfaces to the same repository. The old "Alfresco" interface that is quite document and workflow centric, and the newer Share interface that is collaboration centric. You need to log into them separately, but they have common data that can be accessed through either.

The old interface suffered from a complex array of fancy drop-down menus. This allowed savvy users to do things quickly, but novice users just got lost. The new Share interface not only focuses on collaboration, but also provides a much simpler interface. The new interface is reminiscent of the simplicity of Basecamp, and makes it much more feasible to invite outside users into a collaboration space. Share's other big feature is support of the Microsoft Sharepoint protocol. This is great since it can be integrated with MS Office. Sharepoint is the clear target competition for this version.

I actually can't say much about the installation process, as I just picked up the Windows executable full installer. It installed a JRE, tomcat, Alfresco and Open Office (for document conversion). I didn't have to do much, though if I wanted to do anything more than test, I probably should have installed MySQL on my Windows machine, rather than using the built-in Java database.

After install, I logged into the Share interface and was greeted with a simple Dashboard.

I was able to quickly create a new "site" that provided me with the basic Share components - a wiki, blogs, calendar, forums, and the document library.

Each of the components is simple, albeit a little rudimentary at this point. For example the Wiki has a nice clean interface with a small palette and WYSIWYG functionality.

But in order to embed a picture you need to upload it somewhere and provide the URL for the image. Many wikis do this, but it winds up relegating that task to experts, which somewhat defeats the purpose of a simple collaboration site. Similarly, adding links to other pages in the wiki requires some expertise. I am hopeful that these features will be refined in future iterations (this is a beta), but right now they are showstoppers for deploying to basic users.

Alfresco does really excel at document management. Not only can you easily upload, download and version documents...

...but you can also access the repositories via webdav, CIFS, and now Sharepoint. This is really easy and fantastic for document collaboration. I've been using Sharepoint recently on a project and I found Alfresco a lot easier to use.

There are some very basic "social" components to Alfresco, mainly profiles and avatars. But I think that is sufficient for its intended purpose.

There are some shortcomings to this release that made it somewhat painful to use. I couldn't change my password in the Share interface, nor could I add new users. For that and several other activities, I need to log in separately to the old interface. This made it feel a bit more alpha than beta, but I think Share is the interface of the future for Alfresco and I suspect all of this will eventually get rolled in. Then I might look to Alfresco for document centric collaboration, as best of breed.

While I'm killing time waiting for the 3G iPhone(s) I've been working on an upgrade for Movable Type, which The Obsessive Collaborator runs on. I've been using Movable Type for about five years and have gone through two or three major upgrades along the way. Movable Type 4 was released quite some time ago (and made open source), but I wasn't that compelled to upgrade from the version 3.3x that I was using.

Then I wound up checking out Worpress. I was setting up a simple website that I would be using with a few other people and decided I wanted to do a little experimenting. I wanted something that would be super simple and wouldn't take a lot of time to install or manage. I was intrigued by Expression Engine, and read a lot of good things about it online. But when I looked at the set of features that the free version had, it didn't look any better than a lot of other alternatives.

I had also read a lot good things about Wordpress. It had a famous "5 minute install", lots of plugins and styles and an active community. I couldn't resist the 5 minute install, and got the first install it much less than that (though I had to reinstall in a different directory, by which time at least 6 or 7 minutes had passed). It was very easy to set up and run. I did wind up searching for a number of plugins, none of which were really necessary, one of which added nifty ajax features and another added polls. The templates were easy to use and flexible (as were the plugins), and I realized (as have others) that Wordpress can pretty quickly become a capable CMS.

I then spent a lot of time messing with themes, and finally found Brian Gardner's themes, which were better than anything I put together and required absolutely no work.

Some of the terminology around "pages" and "posts" I found to be a little perplexing. And that made the setup of different sections of the blog a little difficult, but I think that was just a little local lingo that I had to get used to.

When I went to make my first test post, I was really impressed by the simplicity of the interface and ease of use.

One thing that I wasn't ready for (which explains the movement of directories upon installation mentioned above) was that by default Wordpress is designed to run a single blog. I later found that there is a multi-blog version known as "Wordpress MU", but there is some pretty strong wording there that MU is only meant for huge installs. There is also a Virtual Multiblog plugin that looks like it will do the trick if I need more blogs running from that install.

All of that got me thinking that maybe it was time to upgrade Movable Type to get a more current UI experience and make blogging more enjoyable. I decided to do a parallel install of Movable Type on my system, using new directories and a new database. That way I could slowly upgrade my system. I was pretty sure that my templates (mostly for another site) were going to take a fair bit of work to get working correctly, and configuring plugins might also take some time.

That was the right move. Installing Movable Type was easy, and I quickly found that the user interface was close to that of Wordpress.

I also found that upgrading templates was a nightmare. One of my sites uses a pretty complex system of style sheets and templates. Getting that working took several nights of small adjustments. That said, the new system of templates in MT 4 makes them much easier to manage in the long run because templates are broken out into reusable parts. I finally got the templates working and then it came time for the plugins. I narrowed it down to two that I needed MT-Privacy and Better File Uploader.

Privacy has been in a long beta for the current version of Movable Type, and in the end I had to give up on it, as it didn't work with the version of Movable Type I installed. I found many other generic privacy solutions that I was able to get working so it wasn't a huge deal. Better File Uploader is essential though, and on first pass I ran into some small difficulties with it. But within hours after filing a trouble ticket, I had a working version sent to me by the author and all was well again.

Then I found that there were no more notification options in Movable Type. Fortunately there is a plugin for this too, but that meant additional cost. The plugin seems to be doing the job just fine.

I wound up just importing the entries from my old blog into the new database, which went pretty well. And same went for this blog. The old template here wasn't worth saving so I went with one of the stock styles for this blog. Movable Type seems to have much more limited availability of up-to-date styles than did Wordpress. In time I'll come up with a better solution.

If I had to do it all over again, I may choose Wordpress over Movable Type, but the new version holds its own pretty well, and is definitely a marked improvement over the last version.

Other news in the works. Opengoo has a slick looking new interface that I'm trying to get working. And I've put Redmine into production. Next up are some forums for use with Drupal.

I vetted many of the project management tools that I've been looking at with teams at work and Redmine was the overwhelming winner. The one thing it was missing was a calendar, but we've found a makeshift way of dealing with this by inserting a static google calendar with reminders.

http://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/show/950

Still a work in progress but it seemed to work well enough.

Then came time to install Redmine on our production server instead of the test one. Installing Rails wasn't too hard as I found some good tutorials

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnCentos5

I had been running Redmine via lighttpd with fastcgi, but I wanted to go with Mongrel for this install as lighttpd was a bit problematic.

Good instructions on the Redmine wiki and another site
http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/HowTo_run_Redmine_with_a_Mongrel_cluster
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=674598

Figuring out how to fire up Mongrel on boot was harder, but found that eventually too (wish I could remember where I found this one)

mkdir /etc/mongrel_cluster
ln -s /home/redmine/config/mongrel_cluster.yml /etc/mongrel_cluster/redmine.yml
cp /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel_cluster-1.0.5/resources/mongrel_cluster /etc/init.d/
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/mongrel_cluster
chkconfig mongrel_cluster on


Ok. Now the hard part. I knew that there would be some non-technical folks using the site, and I knew that I wanted at least logins secured with ssl. Problem is that Redmine runs under a subdomain, and in fact in this case it was a subdomain of a name based virtual host. I had tried once before to configure certificates to work in this case and failed. But I wanted to try again.

This time I won.

First I had to edit ssl.conf and add in the virtual host (as in the httpd.conf file) and also added this line to take name based virtual hosts
NameVirtualHost *:443

Then I edited openssl.cnf

Under both [usr_cert] AND [ v3_req ]
I added
subjectAltName = @alt_names
and
[alt_names]
DNS.1 = name1.com
DNS.2 = name2.com
DNS.3 = sub.name2.com

where name1.com is the owner's name as well (in the certificates, essentially the FQDN).

Then I found this post that took me through the rest (with the exception of the path to the certificates, which is in /etc/pki/tls in Centos/RHEL 5).

http://nixcraft.com/server-configuration-tutorials/3075-postfix-mail-server-create-self-signed-ssl-certificates-cent-os-redhat-linux.html

Did a little magic with the SVN repository as I had before, and voila it is up and running.

This week I had an occasion to start up a social networking site for some family. I wanted it to be a closed site where Internet newbies and parents of kids who are participating would feel safe. For those same newbies I wanted it to be easy to use.

I had previously looked at Elgg. But I decided to cross Elgg off my list for two reasons. First, it is transitioning to this part framework/part ready-to-run solution, and right now it isn't really either. Second, I think the "classic" version (which is the existing ready-to-run solution) serves as an educational networking space really well, but as a pure social space it fits less well.

I searched around and found several potential candidates. I narrowed it down to Insoshi, Lovdbyless and PeopleAggregator. There are many other solutions out there, but I wanted something that didn't have pluggable components that needed to be upgraded or any particular advanced tools that I don't think this community will need. I also wanted something that was under active development.

Insoshi and Lovdbyless both run on Ruby on Rails. I've been increasing my expertise in deploying RoR apps, but I'm still relatively new so these both took a while to install. PeopleAggregator is a standard LAMP app and took quite a bit less time to install.


Lovdbyless

Lovdbyless took the longest to install. It required quite a number of Ruby gems, not all of which installed in an entirely straightforward way. The biggest problem was rmagick, which is a Ruby library for ImageMagick. I run CentOS 5, which only has ImageMagick 6.2.x, which is not sufficient for the latest version of rmagick. Luckily I found this post on getting the previous release of rmagick to run. I also needed to install the ImageMagick-devel package for it to compile.

The instructions are pretty detailed for Lovdbyless, but they only get you running under WebBrick, which should be considered for testing purposes. In fact they brush over instructions for running this in any kind of production environment. The lack of details on getting this running under other web servers or in a production environment makes it somewhat frustrating. I got close with my existing knowledge, and I'm sure that a more experienced RoR sysadmin could get it going with Apache/mongrel or Lighttpd, but it shouldn't be that hard.

In the end the application was reasonable but pretty bare bones. Blogs and photos.



The administrator capabilities are limited to deleting users, and there was no way (at least in the GUI) to do anything else such as close or partition the community. In the end, I think that Lovdbyless is intended to be a framework for others to build on.


Insoshi

Insoshi is trying to do just that (build on Lovdbyless). They have developed their own social networking package, but have borrowed some pieces from Lovdbyless. It was a bit easier to install, though I still couldn't get it running just right under anything but WebBrick. Even then I had to jump through some hoops (also true of Lovdbyless) to get it running in production mode. I had to manually start the Ferret search server.

Insoshi shows a lot of promise. It has a good community for its age (which seems to be numbered in weeks or months). But it is even more of a bare bones app than Lovdbyless.




PeopleAggregator I'm still trying to get a handle on the story of PeopleAggregator by Broadband Mechanics, but it is LAMP app with a reasonable (though still not great) community that seems to support it. I found a wiki and some discussion threads for a few of the problems that I had during configuration.

Unlike the RoR apps, it got rolling pretty quickly. I did need one extra domxml php package that was available via yum, and in order for it to spawn extra subdomains (or sub-subdomains in my case) I needed a little DNS magic, but all of that was pretty well explained in the setup section.

PeopleAggregator has a much more robust set of tools. You create different networks (subdomains) that can be made private. Within those you can also create groups . Individual users can create posts of several types (blog, audio, video, photo) and with a simple checkbox they'll appear on the network's home page.



There is a pretty extensive configuration section, but some configurations need to be made in the local_settings file on the server. It would be nice if there were an admin account that configured all of those settings, but I couldn't find it. It did, however, make the first user I created have special configuration powers, but it still couldn't touch all of the settings that could be made by hand.

After some tweaking I was able to make a network private, and in fact I was able to make all networks private by editing some things by hand. That doesn't prevent people from creating accounts on the server, but they can't join any networks. It is notable that PeopleAggregator accepts IDs from other sources (Yahoo etc.) and it also will read status from Facebook, AIM and a few others.

It isn't perfect. But it is pretty good, and I like the ability to svn update to bring in any patches rather than having to download, and transfer settings. For now this is my choice. I'll see what the rest of the people say.

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Redmine Revisited

I've briefly reviewed Redmine before. But I saw that they updated to a new version recently and in my search for a project management package that spanned technical and non-technical users I thought I'd give it another spin. It is another RoR app. But this one has quite good documentation on getting it installed and running under a number of different servers. That combined with my past experience had me up and running pretty quickly.

Redmine offers a nice suite of tools in a not too complicated package. With the improvements in this new version the usability is quite good. The one thing that I struggled with was integrating SVN. I just couldn't get it to connect. I posted in the Redmine forums (which use Redmine, which is a good sign) and had some suggestions, but nothing worked. But then another user in the forums solved it. With the SVN integration, the package really stands out. News to the front page of a project includes SVN updates and checkin comments, which is great.

The rest of the tools (Wiki, Files, News, Documents and the Forums mentioned above and shown below) are also pretty good.



There are better wikis and I miss being able to submit tickets by email (though there was word of this appearing in the next release). But it is above the minimum in just about every category that I'm looking for and could replace several apps (Wiki, Ticket Manager, SVN viewer, News) in one fell swoop.

Shortly after I posted about IceCore, I noticed that there was a VMWare image available on their website. That was the easiest way to get going with IceCore, so I fired it up on VMWare Fusion on my Mac. I did have some problems connecting at first. It turned out that the image was only listening to eth0 and my connection was being detected on eth1. I went to edit the network settings, but alas my favorite editor (nano) was not in the image. I limped through vi, and got the settings to work, and poof there was IceCore.

In terms of features, I think IceCore has the perfect (and I do mean perfect) mix. It is easy to create new groups ("Teams") of users to work on projects, and then provide them with a common set of tools that includes Blogs, Calendar, Discussion, Files, Milestones, Surveys, Tasks and a Wiki. This is great combination of tools



There is tons of ajaxy responsiveness in IceCore (note that the proprietary version goes by "Novel Teaming"). But the UI design needs some work. Threaded discussion take up a lot more space than they need to, and some of the features and layout will not be obvious to novice users.

These shortcomings sent me in search of related projects, when I found Liferay. At first, I couldn't tell the difference between Liferay and IceCore, but then Liferay did an update to version 5.0 and I was able to tell them apart. It turns out that IceCore is built on (the earlier version) of Liferay. Both have a similar portal display that allows you to add lots of widgets (both internal "portlets" as well as external sites and google gadgets).



It does add quite a number of features that facilitate working in teams, but much of the underlying functionality remains. There are numerous bundles of Liferay available, and I chose a bundle with Tomcat 5, which simply required me to run a start script. This uses hsqldb (which is fine for testing) and also installed a lot of sample data (which users on the forums have told me how to get rid of if I choose to continue with Liferay).

The new release of Liferay (which I assume IceCore will eventually incorporate) makes some welcome changes. For example, this is how threaded discussions appear in Liferay 5.



While this is how it appears in IceCore



Notice the popup frame that I'm sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't how much discussion forums work. New users like to have familiar functionality.

Similarly, this is how you see Wikis in Liferay.



And this is how you edit them.



These are pretty straightforward. But IceCore adds additional complexity with a Wiki that takes up more space, multiple views that are confusing and popup frames.



But where IceCore shines is in having all of the functionality that is needed in a one step install. Liferay is missing tasks most importantly. These could probably be added with a portlet, though I couldn't find one that was free and easy to integrate. IceCore also makes it really easy to manage teams. Liferay has similar functionality in Communities, but the Teams, along with the spaces that get created for them, are easier from an admin perspective.

I've seen some new UI designs for IceCore in their forums, and if they follow through on those and then build on the new Liferay, I think they'll have a real winner. Still, at this point in time IceCore is one of the best products I've seen. Speaking of which Chronopolys has gone 1.0 final and now includes an easy installer. I've also started looking at the community edition of Alfresco which has some new collaboration features in there. I'll try that next (after I can get it to install - it has been fighting with Liferay).

Recently a few collaborative software projects from blogs past got updated. I took the latest builds of OpenGoo (previous review) and eyeOS (mentioned but not reviewed previously) for a spin.

OpenGoo Take 2
The latest version of OpenGoo is vastly improved. OpenGoo is essentially activeCollab (the old open source edition now know as projectpier) with additional document handling. While it may sound minor, it actually is the one place where activeCollab/projectpier fall short, so this addition is quite welcome. The current build of OpenGoo (0.51 as of this writing) has had a lot of UI redesign with many AJAX additions. The result is a much more cohesive set of applications that no longer feel cobbled together. Instead, the design (including a new integrated menu) makes this feel like a top notch product. Combined with the great project management features already in activeCollab/projectpier, this makes for a very viable product. It is a simple and typical LAMP install.



My one concern about OpenGoo right now is the potentially small developer and user community. While it is a highly active project on Sourceforge, there are few if any postings in the forums on the website or on Sourceforge, and the website itself is sparsely updated. I hope this is because they're putting all of their time into development.

EyeOS in Short
The notion of a Web OS is intriguing to me. So far I don't think any products are really there, but the best I've seen is EyeOS, a WebOS you can install yourself.



The idea behind a Web OS is that you can log into a server and have access to all of your typical applications and data, while nothing has to run locally. EyeOS does a reasonable job at this, replicating somewhat of the look and feel of a desktop OS. What would be great is if you could actually access data on the server through the application, but alas it only accesses data from within the Web OS (the next version will allegedly offer a sync application to sync local files to the server). There are some decent applications - basic office apps, meebo for IM, etc. I haven't quite figured out the web browser yet, since you obviously have access to a web browser if you are using Eye OS. At first I thought it might be for privacy, but all of the cookies and cache are still stored locally. Still it has some potential.

Looking Ahead to Icecore
I recently started exploring another collaborative application called IceCore. From what I can gather IceCore was recently acquired by Novell, which bodes well for its future (in terms of resources anyway).

I haven't tried installing the open source version yet, but I tried out the demo online. There are some confusing things about the interface, but it has a great featureset, and once I got the paradigm figured out it was pretty easy and quite flexible.

I'll offer up a more complete review after I try to install it and run it myself.

Deki Wiki just went to a 1.9a release. And finally reverse proxying works on the standard Vmware image install. A quick install, IP configuration and simple apache reverse proxying configuration (see the bug report) and it was off and running. I renamed the server, which meant further email configuration, but that was it. With Deki Wiki installed I took the chance to play around with it a little. It comes with some very slick skins.



Editing pages via WYSIWYG is very easy. The new version has preliminary support for FCKeditor and TinyMCE in addition to the default editor. The default editor still has the most support for features, and the fewest bugs, but it doesn't work with Safari. I tried the FCKeditor, and it worked fine. The editor floats on the web page, which causes some problems, but it is just experimental for now.

Editing pages, creating links and uploading media is straightforward. I'd put Deki Wiki as my clear choice for Wikis at this point.

Redmine

I've been searching for a project management/trouble ticket system. So far I'm voting for Eventum, which I have configured to manage bugs and features. It accepts incoming requests via email, which is great and it was quite easy to configure. It does one thing and it does it well. But I've been hoping I might find a system that can handle tickets as well as a few additional project management features. Trac is a popular choice, and I'm going to evaluate that further. Redmine is a similar Ruby-based tool, with support for some additional features and multiple projects. I added it to my previous Ruby install following the instructions. Configuration was easy except I never got the external svn repository working. I'm not sure if it was just me or a more fundamental bug. Otherwise, the tool was quite well set up.



But in the end the features of the issue tracking weren't as good as Eventum, and the other features (Documents, Files, Milestones) weren't as good as the best of breed for these tasks. I'd rather have great issue tracking and handle the project management features elsewhere.

The Xwiki project has spawned a number of related projects. One of the recent offspring is Chronpolys, a wiki-based project management site. It still doesn't have a 1.0 release, but it is in release candidate phase. It felt a bit more like a beta, but it had a lot of promise.

It calls itself wiki-based project management, but the wiki is really just one part among many. It combines a solid feature set including timelines, versioned documents, email notifications and of course a wiki. It has an attractive Ajax-full interface though it suffers from some organizational challenges and some interface clutter. Much of the success of Project Pier (or its predecessor ActiveCollab or paid counterpart BaseCamp) may be attributed to the simplicity of their interfaces. Chronopolys has them all beat on feature set, and the interface is slick, but it needs some simplification.

Chronopolys comes in a self-contained zip package that allows you to launch it on Windows, Linux or Mac OS by simply launching a script. This made it great for testing. After a quick configuration you can access the overview/dashboard.



Which can be viewed by timeline (above) or by asset type.



From there you can delve into the details of an individual project. This is presented in a useful fashion at first glance. But the interface for adding or manipulating resources is confusing.

It tries to strike a balance between displaying all of the information about your project and keeping a clean interface. But as the number of assets grow the interface begins to get cluttered and could be challenging for users to find the information that they need.

The wiki is based on xwiki, which is really quite good. And in fact having a wiki as a central part of a project management suite seems like a good idea.



Mindquarry tried that, and unfortunately failed. I hope that Chronopolys can succeed. Most of what it needs is a little less rather than a little more. A little refinement and documentation and this could be a great product.

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Shortly after my recent Elgg review, Elgg announced that they are starting a new codebase and forking the current codebase into Elgg Classic. This new version will be more modular and they will package several configurations for different purposes. The only down side seems to the that setting up a Elgg-based site in the short term is a bit dicey, though they claim the data is portable. The long view is quite positive and worth keeping an eye on.

With all the rage around social networking for fun and business, I often have the opportunity to discuss ideas for integrating social networking into collaborative projects. I have heard about Elgg, an open source social networking package that integrates with a number of other packages, and typically recommended it to those exploring social networking applications. But I have never tried Elgg myself.

This week I've been exploring the possibility of putting together an educational social networking application myself, so I took the plunge and installed Elgg. Installation was fairly easy (typical mysql/php install), with the exception of one required modification that was a bit obscure. The installation instructions recommend modifying the .htaccess file to up the available PHP memory. Since I already had 64M allocation in my php.ini file, I ignored those instructions. It turns out this resulted in a blank page when I tried to access the Elgg site, which was eventually fixed by adding the memory allocation back into the .htaccess file.

When all was set, Elgg fired right up with a clean interface.



It is easy to create a profile and add resources such as a blog.



And sharing files (which it confirms you have "legal rights" to) is also a central element of Elgg. This makes it useful for sharing files created by the community.



There are a number of add on modules, either to integrate into Elgg or to connect with Elgg. I tried a couple that seemed centrally useful to creating an Elgg community. First it was Vanilla Forums. It was pretty easy to integrate simply by uploading the module in the appropriate directory (though it had been checked out from SVN or CVS and contained extraneous files).



Finally it was the Portfolio module. This adds the ability to create Wikis that can be shared across teams, or Portfolios that can be used by individuals. I thought the Wikis would be useful for teams working on projects together. The Wikis are rather simple (just really like the blogs organized in a different way).



First experience seems to show that Elgg could be a solid basis for a community. It certainly has idiosyncrasies (e.g. search functions don't search the modules), but the community is active and it shows a lot of promise.