Welcome to Elgg's documentation
This is the place to find documentation on all aspects of Elgg. If you would like to contribute your own documentation please do; we want this to be a real community effort!
Communities
From Elgg Documentation
Contents |
[edit] Formal communities
Once you have found others with similar interests - or perhaps you are part of a research groups or a course/class - you may want to have a more formal community setting. This is where Elgg's powerful community building features can be used.
- You can create and moderate as many communities as you like
- You can keep all community activity private to the community or you can use the 'make public' option to disseminate work to the wider public.
- Each community produces granular RSS feeds, so it is easy to follow community developments
- Each community has its own URL and profile
- Each community comes with a file repository and blog
Once a community has been formed, those who join the community can contribute to the collective blog and file repository. This is an excellent way to share ideas and to collaborate together.
[edit] Creating a community
In most systems, anyone can create a community (although it is possible to limit this ability to administrators).
- Click on Your Network
- Click on the owned communities submenu option
- At the bottom of the screen is a create community form. You need to give the community a name as well as a username; the name is the full descriptive name throughout the system. The username is the short name that will be formed when
- Click 'create'
[edit] What is a community?
Technically, a community has all the same properties and abilities as a user. That means it's got a weblog, profile, resources and a file repository. The difference is that anyone who's a member of a community can upload content to those spaces, and the owner of that community has the ability to edit and remove content.
[edit] What if I don't want everyone to be able to join?
You can restrict access to your communities. For example, you might want to vet users before you let them in.
- Click on your community's profile
- Select the edit community details submenu option
- Select your moderation type
[edit] Transferring ownership
Admins can change the ownership of a community. Again, just go into the community settings, and type the username of the user you'd like to take the reigns.
[edit] Ad-Hoc communities
You can build ad-hoc communties around shared interests within Elgg. For example:
- As you fill out your profile, the system will create links between you and other people/resources within Elgg, based on keywords you enter. Selecting one of these links will produce a page with all of the people and resources which share that same keyword. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed that is produced, and can then follow all developments based on that interest.
- You can also use the search interface to find both people and resources for a specific keyword. When the results of the search are displayed, an RSS feed will be produced. If you put this feed into your aggregator of choice (such as Elgg's 'My Resources'), it will now be possible to follow all activity that happens on Elgg relating to the specific interest you have chosen.
Elgg makes use of its extensive tagging architecture to create these linkages.
