New to Elgg Want Help

I am a memeber of an application development group who is planning about using Elgg  for developing an online academic network as a part of out final year college network.

 

We want to introduce some restrictions in the present scenario available in Elgg 1.8.1 and further.

For example we want to completely remove the concept of friends.

We want something like users can only interact over groups and the same are allowed to be created by few people like faculties and administrator(s).

Similiarly we have few more restrictions..

 

Can anyone help how we can go about it as we are all new to PHP programming.

If we well get assistance then only we can move further and get our project passed.

  • Welcome to Elgg. Elgg 1.8.X is a good solution for you as it provides more plugin hooks /API's and options to create your own contents /remove core components. You can start with http://docs.elgg.org and http://reference.elgg.org. Using plugin hooks, you can remove the friend concept to some extend and create restrictions on users. But it all depends on how good you are with php and how fast you can learn the elgg frame work. The best option is to digg the code and read the documentation. Ask questions here, if you cant find an answer from the old topics /docs etc.. People will help you.

  • To remove friend functionality you can simply disable the friends plugin.

  • @Matt Okk i got it for friends.

    is it possible to disable creation of groups by a specific kind of users or in another words creation of groups is allowed to people only some specified groups and rest of users do have the only option to interact with others on predefined groups.

     

    And what is the best way to start off for completely analyzing elgg.

  • Currently I don't believe there is any way to disable group creation by "kinds" of users, because Elgg only has two kinds of users.  Regular users and admins.  I know there are some plugins that can create pseudo-types of users for specific circumstances, there may be something out there for groups but I'm not sure offhand.

    There has been a number of conversations about how best to create a global user roles system but so far nothing has really come of it.  It doesn't appear to be a direction the core team is going in so if it does end being implemented it will be via 3rd party plugin.  A few ideas are bouncing around in my head, and when I get time I may try a few small proof of concepts to see what might work best.  It's not a priority for me right now though so I can't give you an ETA, or even a guarantee that I will actually get anything done...

  • If you only want to allow admins to create groups you can wrap the menu item that shows the "create new group" link in the following:

    if(isadminloggedin()){

    // stuff here

    }

     

     

  • @Matt : are you sure there is a friends plugin for 1.8? We could not find any such plugin in our install. We will download a new elgg copy and check.

    For 1.7.X there is a friends plugin. But its just for the friends widget system.

    The friends system is a core functionality.

  • @All:

    Yepperz.. Friends went inside the closed doors ;-oO;P more or less as a part of the 'Users" aspect and all the relevant code pieces are scattered in the Users  code blocks ;) Kinda dwangz huh ? But after one gets into how the structural elements hang together.. hmm.. newie technqiues, new power ! eg -- Try and look up the hover menu items handling  !?;-P funz !

     

  • Yeah, I had the friends 1.7 plugin listed because I upgraded, but you're right, there is no friends plugin for 1.8.  My apologies.

    You'll have to do some hook tinkering after all.

  • plz guys suggest me the easiest method to remove friends functionality from 1.8.x..

     

    I am new to php programming so i can't just play with code and leadd the system into mess

  • 1. Unregister menu items

    2. Unregister actions

    3. Unregister page_handlers

    4. Unregister plugin_hooks