Moving From OxWall And Other Questions

Hey All,

Brand new here and starting to check out Elgg as a possible replacement. I have a  few questions that I hope that can be answered here to guide me through my choice of a replacement social networking software solution.

1. Are there any import tools that I can use to move content from Oxwall to Elgg? Specifically I'd like to move at least my user base, ie User name, login info, email etc, but if I can do more that would be better.

2. This is a dedicated group site, kind of like a group on Facebook. When a user signs up they are automatically friends/following everyone else that is already a  member of the group. With Oxwall I could not do this and I had to do some funky DB manipulation tied to a cronjob to make sure any new users were automatically friends/following everyone else in the site. Is this possible in Elgg naturally or with a plugin or will I again have to do some custom DB work to make this happen?

Thanks for any feedback provided.

Cheers

  • I did find this for making "Everyone Friends", but it doesn't look like its being actively developed any more.

    https://elgg.org/plugins/384624

  • Plugins can do practically anything tied to events. I could imagine everyone being friends having some performance implications, hopefully others will chime in about this. Alternately you could put everyone in a group, which has notifications on all content created in the group.

  • I just looked at that plugin, it would need to be rewritten.

  • Making everyone a friend is not a problem, but you will end up with performance issues. There are still some areas of 2.3 that are not scalable, as well as poorly written plugins, that try to load all friends, so you will have to watch out and optimize (rewrite to use SQL subqueries vs loading all friends). It should be better in 3.0, but in 2.3 you still have the friendspicker, which will basically overload your server if there are too many friends.
    Perhaps a better approach would be to just assume everybody on the site is a friend and modify the notifications and other logic to just operate as if it were so.

  • Its not a huge site and its will have a finite number of users (Nothing more than few hundred), so making everyone friends shouldn't be too much of an issue, but duly noted. The idea is that it is a trusted site and everyone on the site is a "friend" to each other. Thanks for feedback! 

  • IMO, friendships are redundant if everybody is a friend anyway. Just update the access subqueries and a few areas where friends are assumed and you will be better off. I don't think it makes sense wasting cycles making everyone friends.

  • @ Slen Dot Net Slen Dot Net , Welcome home from Oxwall land. Here in the community you can search for community plugins and look for plugins that can accomplish your goal and if you can not find one, then with the help of the community you can seek for help and then try and keep your hands dirty "try coding" in order to learn how Elgg works. After a few months you should be ready to fly in the world of Elgg engine language.

    Back to your question, I think Ismayil Khayredinov Ismayil Khayredinov , has explained it better why you might not want to make all your users friends. The more friends you have the longer it will take for most of your user's pages to load and even the your data query will go nuts due to constant bombardments when most of your users are active on your site.