My 2 cents on elgg 1.8

Ok, let me start off by saying that I am kind of a social network nut!  I have tried many social networking scripts big, and small and although I have only been using/testing elgg 1.8 for the last couple of days I have found elgg to be a very nicely designed and functional social networking script. It seems to load pages very fast which is always nice. The admin panel was pretty straight forward and easy to figure out also. I like how elgg handles every addon as a plugin (including themes). Most content management systems, and social networking sites have two different areas for adding themes and plugins so kudos to elgg for keeping things simple! I always prefer user friendly admin panels over bloated/confusing ones that offer way too many configuration options.

Another thing I like about elgg is the user profile pages. I was so happy not to see a profile page that resembled Facebook. I am so sick of social networking scripts trying to look and work like Facebook. If I see another Facebook type design on one I may just shoot myself?  I love how you can add widgets to your profile with the click of a button. MY favorite being the "Message Board" widget which allows users to leave comments on your profile page. This is an old school social networking feature that was used on MySpace and I absolutely prefer this type of commenting system to the newer "every member gets a Facebook wall" on their profile page approach.  

Now I'm going to tell you a few things that I don't like about elgg. For starters, there are very few themes for elgg that are any good and free to use. I haven't even seen any "paid" themes that I actually liked enough to consider buying.  Another thing I don't like is the "Files" plugin. Boy, this thing looks very dated. It does not even work half the time and requires additional plugins to make it show a mp3 player, or video player. I uploaded a few wmv videos with the galiPlayer plugin and none of them would even play. I kept getting all of these streaming error messages in Flowplayer. Sure there is an option to download the video, but wasn't that a feature like back in 1990 or something like that?  Audio and Video has become a huge part of social networking and elgg needs to focus on developing a few good core modules/plugins to handle audio and video uploads/playback. Also while I'm on the plugins topic, I also noticed that elgg does not have a main forum plugin. It seems to use the "Groups" plugin to handle site wide discussions. I find that a bit awkward, and very strange. I would love to see elgg, or even  3rd party developers create some branches or forum plugins for real forum software such as myBB, SMF, vBulletin, phpBB, and so on.

Well, that is my elgg 1.8  review. I could write more, but my pancakes and sausage are calling my name.

Please feel free to comment. :)

  • Thanks for the feedback. We're glad to hear you like Elgg!

    Some replies:

    For starters, there are very few themes for elgg that are any good and free to use.

    I agree that there aren't many good themes available. The problem is that in most cases the best themes have been custom-made to a specific client, so they can't be released to the community.

    Elgg 1.9 will however include the responsive Aalborg theme which is a huge improvement compared to the Elgg 1.8 default theme. Take a look here: http://blog.elgg.org/pg/blog/evan/read/229/elgg-19-mobilefriendly

    Would it be of any help to have detailed instructions on how to make your own themes?

     Audio and Video has become a huge part of social networking and elgg needs to focus on developing a few good core modules/plugins to handle audio and video uploads/playback.

    There has been a lot of discussion about this recently:
    https://community.elgg.org/discussion/view/1653829/anyone-excited-to-team-up-to-create-an-enhanced-video-plugin-for-elgg
    https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg/issues/7089

    This isn't exactly a trivial issue as you can see from the discussions.

    But remember that it's always possible to integrate some third-party video service into Elgg. Very large and popular Elgg sites will have to separate this kind of services from Elgg anyway in order to be scalable. It would be too much for a single web server to stream video to thousands of concurrent users AND take care of serving Elgg itself at the same time.

    I also noticed that elgg does not have a main forum plugin

    We are aware of this, and there are plans about pulling discussions into its own plugin: https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg/issues/5994

    Did I miss anything?

  • Awesome @juho i will agree with you ..
     

  • But remember that it's always possible to integrate some third-party video service into Elgg. Very large and popular Elgg sites will have to separate this kind of services from Elgg anyway in order to be scalable. It would be too much for a single web server to stream video to thousands of concurrent users AND take care of serving Elgg itself at the same time.

    I agree, there should be an easy ways of  adding 3rd party videos to all types of elgg posts. The best way to do that is to just add some new icons to the WYSIWYG editor in the post/text area that will allow users to add remote links to Youtube videos, or even better yet, why not allow video embed codes in the "HTML" (source code) button in the WYSIWYG editor? ... I tried to embed a Youtube video in a blog post yesterday that way and the video showed up in edit mode, but when I published the blog to the site, elgg blocked the video from embedding for some reason? and I was left with an empty post published. I was very disappointed with that. HTML/Source should accept all HTML if admin chooses to allows it!

  • there should be an easy ways of  adding 3rd party videos to all types of elgg posts

    The embed extender plugin already does that: https://community.elgg.org/plugins/787632/1.8.3/embed-extender

    Just paste a YouTube/Vimeo/Metacafe link to the content and it is automatically replaced by an embedded video. It's also possible to add support for other services through a custom plugin.

    HTML/Source should accept all HTML if admin chooses to allows it!

    This is also possible either by disabling the htmLawed plugin completely (which significantly reduces security!) or modifying it's configuration through a custom plugin.

  • Disabling htmlawed is very unsafe without proper replacement. You might want to allow some very specific html tags to make inline videos work, but that should be very carefully chosen stuff IMO to avoid security issues.

  • Thanks for the helpful tips Juho.  I'll look in to those plugins ;)

    Thanks for reading/commenting guys!

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