January 2008 Archives

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.

I got pretty close with DekiWiki, but it never made it all the way to working with the Apache Reverse Proxy. Along with a number of other posts on Opengarden forums, it seems like getting DekiWiki to work across an Apache reverse proxy is non-trivial or impossible in the current state. It works just fine for viewing posts without pictures, but any of the URLs that include @api fail. This may have something to do with the fact that DekiWiki itself uses a reverse proxy on those calls to forward it internally to port 8081. So while I like DekiWiki and the community behind it, I have temporarily abandoned it in favor of...

Xwiki
I went back to the Wikimatrix in search of another good open source WYSIWYG wiki and found Xwiki.

Xwiki had an easy to use self-contained version that I was able to quickly and easily install on my server. It turns out that a few days later that version was updated, and updating that version is not straightforward. I had to take the new zip version and copy out the necessary directories to avoid writing over my previous data. But after that I was updated. Then I went and added the start script to my startup scripts, added some Apache rules, and all was well.

Xwiki is a good looking Wiki with useful WYSIWYG editing functions and very access, group and user control.



I found the access control particular straightforward and well implemented.



The WYSIYWG editing isn't particularly fancy, it is just an adapted version of TinyMCE, but it works well enough. The only incident I had was when adding some Flash to a page via HTML. It lost the HTML when I went back and forth from Wikicode to WYSIWYG.

But in most other ways Xwiki performed just fine. It allowed comments and attachments with ease.



Xwiki seems to have a reasonable community, but not the development that DekiWiki has going on. I was also disappointed to find only a mailing list (with archives) for Xwiki and no forum. The archives are fine for searching for particular problems, but less easy to just browse to learn more as a newbie to the system. Still, one of the better wikis for novices that I have found, and one that I'll be continuing to test.

While updates haven't been very frequent (to say the least), that doesn't mean I have stopped my obsession with collaboration. My two latest efforts are an update to Zimbra 5.0 (in both the FOSS edition and the paid edition), and a start with DekiWiki. While both of these experiences brought with them some installation and upgrade pitfalls, I am overall impressed with both products.

Zimbra 5.0.1 I have been using Zimbra for over a year now. Zimbra's purchase by Yahoo hasn't had a noticeable impact on the product (if you discount the "accidental" inclusion of a Yahoo search feature in one of the new skins). I use the FOSS version of Zimbra on a RHEL 4 VMware virtual machine at home, and the commercial version on a RHEL4 server at work. Both are great, and this update actually brings the functionality of the commercial and FOSS versions closer together.

Version 5.0 introduces many new features. Most notable among them are full-fledged CalDav support, a briefcase that provides a useful interface to online documents, much more flexible sharing, IM, tasks and a totally reworked infrastructure that feels a lot snappier. The interface itself has some more polish, but is fairly similar to 4.5, with the exception of the inclusion of an iPhone/iPod Touch interface that is fantastic.

From a Mac User's perspective I think the biggest update is great CalDav integration with iCal for Mac OS X 10.5. When I first fired up my Mac after updating the server to 5.0.1, iCal somehow detected that I was connected to CalDav server (presumably through my email client settings) and just set up the CalDav client. I thought that all my old events had been duplicated with the iSync conduit, but in fact they were there twice because the old iSync calendar was turned on as was the new CalDav version. Subsequently I have turned off the iSync conduit for calendar and only use it with Address Book.

There are still quite a number of small bugs, judging by the traffic on the forums. I ran into one that threw me for a loop for a few hours after upgrading both servers. The major change in architecture (from Tomcat to Jetty) seems to have resulted in a change in the way that certificates are handled, and migrating certificates from 4.5.X to 5.0 and 5.0.1 has not gone well. I ran into this problem as well. It turned out I needed to destroy my old certificates for all to work well in the end. But the forums are very active and it didn't take long to figure that out.

Outlook still requires the Exchange substitute that comes with the commercial version (though there are works on progress providing CalDav support in Outlook). Though on Windows one could use the Sunbird calendar. There is also a beta of a plugin for Evolution on Linux.

Overall Zimbra is top notch for a mail and calendar server and seems to be the most platform agnostic of any I have found.


Deki Wiki I'm still in the early stages of experimenting with DekiWiki. Deki Wiki is the most novice-friendly wiki that I've found. It is very polished, provides a WYSIWYG interface for editing, supports attachments, and sophisticated permissions. While there are a number of "WYSIWYG" wikis, most of them feel like (probably because they are) grafts of WYSIWYG editors onto standard wiki format text boxes. This is not the case for Deki Wiki where WYSIWYG feels central.

The architecture for Deki Wiki is a bit unusual. It is your standard LAMP (WAMP) with the additional requirement of Mono/.Net 2.0. This is a very strange thing to do IMHO. It means that it isn't quite at home on either Linux or Windows. I had stayed away from it for this reason for some time. But now they make an easy to install and update VMware image that you can just drop in. I thought that was my opportunity to give it a whirl.

Configuration for running on a LAN was a breeze. It was essentially a wizard setup. Follow a few prompts and log in to the DHCP assigned address. The End. Turning this into an Internet accessible server, was then a bit of a chore. Some command line tools to change to a static IP which was well documented on the site. I also used an additional pointer from the forums. I didn't want to use up a real IP address, so I set about learning Apache Proxy (and reverse proxy) procedures. I found this tutorial and this one really helpful. This got me 90% of the way there, but some links weren't being rewritten correctly, until I found documentation on ProxyHTMLLinks, which was missing.

Success! At least for most operations. I'm still troubleshooting and experimenting and will try to offer a more complete review soon.