"Pre-sales" questions about Elgg's capabilities..

Am loving what I'm seeing of Elgg so far.

Questions:

1. Has Elgg been run on something very high performance? I'm thinking of using it for an environment that may have a huge user base -- to the tune of 1.5 million users in a year or so. 

2. I love the social networking aspects of Elgg. But I am thinking of a website that can mingle the functionality of a socnet with some information too. How easy is it to use Elgg as a "content management system"? Sorry for that dated phrase but I can think of no better way to describe "one way" information publication. 

3. How robust is search in Elgg? I'm looking for a search plugin that does full-text search and shows results categorized by components (or predefined sections).

4. Within the same organization I may run Elgg for different departments. Each Elgg "department" will be completely secluded from the other. How easy is it to run this kind of "multiple" Elgg socnets from just one installation of Elgg?

Many thanks!!

  • @Phoenix

    If you do  some decent research on this site and on the google Elgg groups - DEV and USER ==>

    you will know that all your questions have been asked and answered many many times before ;-)

    and - yes - Elgg can be made to deliver all those features...

  • Thanks Dhrup. But DEV and USER are just hard to find. That's what I mean by search limitation.

    Has anyone compared Elgg with Boonex' dolphin? The latter seems to be a bit more intuitive in how things work.

  • yes... some of the usual nice toys might be missing from Elgg, but all of elgg is free open source whereas BooneEx is not, you want nicer dolphin toys => $998. I tried Dolphin Free and had problems. I tried Elgg and 3 minute install and flying ;-) Any feature I don't see - there's usually a plugin around or I can code my own. I actually tried 20, 30, +++ CMS type of pkgs last year before I met Elgg and never leaving.

    Regarding "..just hard to find.." - do not have problems googling for knw-how on things (in Elgg I am not familiar with ;-O -- it just takes a bit trying and patience.

    Regards.

     

  • Depending on your needs you could also have a look at BuddyPress, the Drupal CMS or a mature bulletin board system like phpBB or vBulletin. The CMS part of elgg is almost non existent and not comparable to the skills of Drupal or WordPress/BuddyPress. But Elgg may be the better option if you are looking for a good framework you can build your community on.

    You will find some discussions about elgg performance in the Group "Server Optimization":
    http://community.elgg.org/pg/groups/15/server-optimisation/

    As far as I can see version 1.5 seems to be faster than previous versions because of better use of caching. But you should still have a very good look at the database model if you are going to build a huge site with it.

    I had a look at Dolphin, too. I think this software is not made to be customized very much, and it is not Open Source.

    If you really want to run a site with milions of users I would recommend that you should install some of them, give them a test drive and let your programmers and sysadmins have a deep look at each. It is worth the effort and afterwards you will know what you can offer to your client and what not.

     

  • I want a social network and a CMS. For high traffic websites, does Wordpress make sense? Has someone integrated Movable Type with Elgg? (Just different URLs from the same server really, but by integration I mean showing a unified theme on the front page, etc).

    Search in Elgg is a huge weakness. I tried searching for plugins on "full text search" for example and came up with nothing.

    Also, how can I "subscribe to discussions"? I would like to get a notification when someone replies to my post or discussion. Sounds like a simple social networking functionlity, but it's not built in?

  • hmmm... you asking too many questions... ;-O

    I may be able to help further if you'd like to meesage me directly.

  • @phoenix

    if you are expecting to setup a large site, but do not have the resources yourself to investigae into the finer details of what Elgg offers or perhaps may have a sight shortcoming for what you envision, you  will not necesarily get satisfyng answers by posting on numerous topics, hoping that someone may have some magical answers to all your queries. Open Source -- such as Elgg particularly grows in features and power simply there are some people out here and there who - when they have spare time from their real day-work put in a lot of of effort in developing varius areas of the pkg.

    I suggested gently to you earlier.. You sound like you need a *professional consultant to investigate Elgg for what seems to a large project that you are planning. And large projects generally deserve a much more serious fact-finding approach that the "fishing" you seem to be doing.-

  • Dhrup and Dave,

    This meme "I plan to have a million users and I demand that you answer my questions right now." has repeated itself numerous times over the last 6 months. Such people are almost always a category of troll using inflated member projections to get attention and in my view such posts aren't worth spending a lot of time responding to.

    Building a social networking site with a million users using off-the-shelf open source software (whether Elgg or something else)  is almost certainly a pipe dream and in any case, no one with a serious site development plan would post questions in this way.

    My 2 cents.

    Kevin

  • @Kevin,

    nicely phrased ;-O

    I did offer to do his googling for $50/hr ;-O

  • Well. maybe my previous post was unnecessarily grouchy.

    However, I think the point remains that people are quite happy to answer questions on this forum and posting stuff like "I plan to have a million users" or even "I plan to have 10 million users" (I saw that one a few months ago) really reduces your credibility and doesn't make it more likely that your questions will be answered.

    I suppose that I was also annoyed by the comment:

    "Search in Elgg is a huge weakness. I tried searching for plugins on "full text search" for example and came up with nothing."

    If you have the resources to develop a social network with a million users, you certainly have the resources to develop a full text search plugin for Elgg.

    Elgg is a community-supported open source project. Most people get that as the 530 plugins in repository currently show. If you see a gap, you can code a plugin to fill it in. No need to complain!