Upcoming Elgg Meets
April 15, 2008
We're having a couple of events in various places over the coming months, where we'll get together to talk about Elgg. In all cases, look for us dressed in the black tees you see pictured to the right. Come say hi; we'd love to talk to you.
San Francisco Elgg Meet: Wednesday, May 7 3pm - 8pm Thirsty Bear Brewing Co., 661 Howard Street (at 3rd) http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/473595/
Elgg Jam 08: Wednesday, June 18, all day Roxy Bar and Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, London http://elggjam.com/
Marcus Povey will also say a little about the forthcoming Open Data Definition at the Oxford Geek Night on April 22nd: Jericho Tavern, 56 Walton St, Oxford http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/432766/
Update: Vancouver cancelled.
From: News - Read more
Elgg Social Networking is now available from Packt Publishing
March 31, 2008
We're excited to announce that Packt Publishing's Elgg Social Networking by Mayank Sharma is now available to purchase. The book takes you through Elgg's features, setting up an Elgg site, and more advanced activities like podcasting, customising your theme and setting up moderated communities. This is a great way to introduce yourself to Elgg and harnessing its power for your own needs.
You can purchase from a number of sites, including Amazon and the Packt Publishing website.
From: News - Read more
Elgg is a social application platform
March 28, 2008
To date, Elgg has been a great tool for creating a web-based social network. It was the first social networking platform to include OpenID support, and through its support of standards like RSS, FOAF and XML-RPC, as well as its highly extensible architecture, provides functionality unique to the market. If you want MySpace in a box, you can do it with Elgg; if you want a customised network with functionality specific to your niche requirements, you can do that too.
Elgg 1.0 takes this flexibility as a starting point and supercharges it.
The Internet is changing in a number of important ways. It's no longer enough to throw up an interactive website; people access their information through a variety of tools in a variety of ways. Since Elgg was first released we've seen smartphones come on in leaps and bounds, and then entirely redefined by the iPhone. Web services have become vastly more important, and users expect to be able to access their data in the way that's most convenient to them. Data portability has become a hot button issue in the technology sector.
We've talked about all of these things since the beginning, and because we knew they were coming, we were ready for them.
Sure, you can do the things you've always done with Elgg; you can still have a web-based social network in a box that's easy to set up and configure. But now there's more. Elgg 1.0 acts as a social application engine; a way to power any socially-aware application, whether it's on the web or not.
Of course, Elgg now has a full external API, and because it's Elgg, it's fully extensible. Out of the box, it provides results in XML, JSON or serialised PHP. Plugins can add new output formats and new API calls, exposing any functionality you require. This means that you can have a mobile Java application and applications running on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, the Web, or any other platform, using the same single application infrastructure under the hood. You don't even need to have a web interface if you don't want to - or you can have any number you want, for different browsers or audiences.
Elgg 1.0 is future-proof, easier to build for than ever, and reorganised to provide a simple way to create any socially-aware site or application. We can't wait to introduce it to you.
It's not just the software that's extensible: our business is too. In the coming months, we'll be setting up a network of affiliates who will provide Elgg related services. If you offer (or want to offer) Elgg customisation, support, hosting or consultancy, drop us a line and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
From: News - Read more
UK Elgg User Group
March 20, 2008
One of the biggest groups currently using Elgg, are those in Education. Therefore, we are delighted that Stan Stanier, from the University of Brighton, has managed to get a new UK Elgg User Group up and running.
The core team behind Elgg are going to sponsor this group as we feel everyone will benefit from the discussion and subsequent dissemination that will occur. It is groups such as this that allow us to keep in close contact with those using Elgg at their institution, this can only be a good thing in the context of product development and support.
We look forward to seeing how the group develops.
From: News - Read more
