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.
Keywords: affiliates, api, elgg 1.0, elgg affiliates, extensibility, features
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We've set up an ElggVoices channel for general Elgg discussion. This is not a replacement for the forums, but if you're out and about and have a quick question, or would like to talk to the community in a more instant way, we think you'll find it very useful.