Elgg Blog: Introducing the Elgg Showcase

Today we're announcing the release of the Elgg Showcase, a new section of the community dedicated to showing off the best sites powered by Elgg.

For the longest time the place to share the Elgg sites you're working on has been in the Sites Powered by Elgg doc on docs.elgg.org. This was straightforward, but we felt it was not as compelling an experience as it could be, so we've written a plugin for the community site dedicated to showing off sites powered by Elgg.

Right now the page is extremely simple: just a static list of sites that I chose based on the existing list on the wiki linked above. However, it also features screenshots of the homepages of those sites, so you can get an at-a-glance feel for what that site has to offer. We think this important visual aspect will make the showcase that much more compelling than the previous solution.

If there's enough interest, we can put some more effort into letting you upload your own screenshots through the community site. Eventually we envision a ranking system so that the best sites can rise to the top, and profile integration so that people can see sites you or your team have worked on specifically. But all that depends on the interest level, so please let us know what you think!

If you'd like your site to be added to the showcase, please let us know by sending an email to info@elgg.org with your site's URL.

  • I'd like to showcase my elgg site based off of the new myspace layout. The layout has been coded by hand by me without copying any code from the original.

    http://demyx.com

  • @cim It looks very clean. What's it about? We need a purpose/mission/blurb.

  • Right now it's in beta. Certain pages have certain CSS and js but yeah there's no mission statement or purpose for my site yet. I do photography so I will be doing a contest on editing a raw file. Best editor will win $20 in PayPal credits. This will be a monthly thing.

  • @Evan : Good job. Hope this will make Elgg more interesting to the freshers. Few suggestions,

    1) Why cant we create it just like an entity system? This way it will be easy to maintain, like editing, deleting, pagination support etc. Renaming the blog or the file's plugin is enough for this. 

    2) Let the users list their sites, by entering the site title, web address, category, and a description. We will generate the thumbnail automatically, with help of the webservices like wordpress thumbnail generator. This will reduce the effort in generating the thumbnails.

    3) In the new system, we can add a featured portfolios, which the community admin can handpick.

    4) Infuture, we can add options for others to rate the listings.

  • I think the purpose is to show off 'the best sites' (not sure what the criteria is) but if everyone gets to put in their site then the list of the best gets diluted with every newbies startup site that looks like a default installation with different colors. (No offense intended to newbies and their sites!)

     

  • My elgg site has been modified to the max with php, css3 and jquery to rearrange elements

  • I guess we can look for inspiration...

  • If there's enough interest, we can put some more effort into letting you upload your own screenshots through the community site. Eventually we envision a ranking system so that the best sites can rise to the top, and profile integration so that people can see sites you or your team have worked on specifically. But all that depends on the interest level, so please let us know what you think!


    I like this Idea hope this would come soon in community .. It will make community.elgg.org more live. and new people can take an idea what can be done from the elgg system.




  • @Matt, yes, it's very important for us to maintain a certain level of quality. Best way to get in the showcase is to have a good-looking custom theme and a clear purpose/mission.

    @Mohammed

    1) If enough people want in/find this useful, we will use Elgg's entity system. This is just something I hacked up in a couple hours, so I didn't take time to do it The Elgg Way.

    2) Auto-generated thumbnails sounds like a nice idea. That's definitely what took the longest in putting this together. We'd have to make sure the quality is good enough (e.g. if people are using walled garden, that's not going to be a very exciting screenshot).

    I think suggestions 3 and 4 are great. It's a just matter of time/priority.

     

  • I would like to include mine but since it is not for newbies and my site hasn't been around for that much (3 years) I consider it shouldn't be on the list.

    In addition to that, I submitted my site countless times here in the community and suddenly this list appears out of the blue... But that's ok with me :)

  • This is a great idea, it can well convince people to use Elgg as a framework.

     

    I think it is important to have an option for community to post new websites and choose which ones are good, so that this showcase can contain new, better websites as they are created. Otherwise, it may look like services section on a main page, which is right now a few years old and with no option for anyone new to get on the list.

     

    Having said this, probably a few websites should be shown on top, as featured by core team - websites that would best convince people to use Elgg as a framework.

  • @thouseef -- Thanks for the report! Will get that removed in the next version.

    @RJ -- what is your site? I would not consider 3 years to be "new". But newness doesn't really matter anyways. If it looks too much like stock Elgg and/or doesn't have a unique or compelling purpose, those are the kinds of sites that aren't going to make the cut (which is admittedly subjective at the moment).

    @Mike -- Glad you like it! I sure hope it helps people seriously consider Elgg. I like the idea of making this a community-managed thing, but I'd like to get some sense of quality into the system before we just open the floodgates, you know? In any case, pull requests are probably your best option if you want to speed things along. I feel like a lot of the dev shops out there have already created plugins for this kind of thing, so surely it would be straightforward to contribute, right? I agree that we need an action plan to keep it from getting stale.

  • Its definetly cool, a way for people here to find eachothers sites, as far as showcasing the best on rankings thats a sweet idea too, and for the people here who make plugins and actually contribute their free plugins to enhance everyones network, they should have an extra icon or something by their thumbnail w/ custom small blurb of text and if these authors have donations links available maybe place a donation button right next to their homepage link or something.

    @Matt Beckett - Whats wrong with: A site that looks like a default installation with different colors? =)
    Kinda seems like their should be 2 lists next to eachother, 1 for author sites or real contributors here and 1 for the big list of rated sites.

  • Hey please see www.portalafricanista.com is an elgg powered site for religious.. Thanks like to be in showcase

  • Yeah, I think http://www.milocker.com looks too much like stock elgg... Right?

    image

    May be this elgg powered site can make it to the Showcase:

    http://www.socialbusinessworld.org/

    Or may be it looks much like stock elgg as well....

  • No need to get snippy people, it was a first release and you can't expect everyone to know about every site.

  • @Michele - no, it wasn't intended for you.  Snippy means like passive agressive and/or sarcastic.  RJ posted screenshots of a really nice elgg site that very obviously is well done and not stock, but is passive agressively stating that it must be too stock-like as it didn't make the initial list.

    I'm just saying, no need to be like that, it was a first release of the showcase.  Personally I think that site looks great and should make the cut.

  • hmm.. wondering is this is 'stock elgg' too snipz!;-P
    image

    image

    nahh!;-P looks like 90's geocities!  that's
    what almost 1/4 million kids/users say !! 

  • 'sucessful' ?

    it is the same principle as giving out free ice-creams..
    give to one kid and they will all come to you.

    same as with elgg plugins,
    give one free gpl plugin and they all come to you,
    wanting more and more and more... ahaha LOL?!

     

  • @Matt There's no need to be like that, I know. I was adding some spice to the conversation.

    Now, seriously:

    http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Sites_powered_by_Elgg

    That list has been up for quite some time, has been updated, and our site isn't even listed there. I even submitted the site when there was a thread asking about elgg networks:

    http://community.elgg.org/discussion/view/778902/screenshots-of-elgg-sites?annoff=25

    I don't have any problems with the sites in the Showcase and no problems about not being in any of those lists.

    I respect the decisions made about the sites that are displayed in the Showcase.

    Regards,

  • Evan created the list based on sites he knew about. It wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of the best sites out there.

    We used to allow anyone to add their site to the wiki but spam was too much of an issue. Almost all the sites listed there were put there by the owner of the site. We'll be taking that list down soon I think because the showcase does a much better job of showing what people can do with Elgg.

  • here's am interesting pretty example used by another foss (cms) successfull platform which is practically a household word.. enough to be aspired for.

  • @Cash I don't follow your logic. So, this isn't an 'exhaustive list of the best sites out' however we want to show the best sites so that people choose elgg?

     

     

Evan Winslow

Software Engineer at Google. Elgg enthusiast. I wrote the Javascript and CSS frameworks for 1.8.

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