Want to embed elgg functionality in external site

Hi guys, I'm just getting used to the whole MVC structure of elgg. Luckily the tutorials are helping...however, I'm at an impass.

Problem: I want to embed the following elgg functionality on an external site via divs or popups:

  • user communication module (messages)
  • publish a url with preview to a group
  • user credentials (specifically, I need to know which groups a user belongs to, their "level" in elgg and a their unique ID)
  • login to elgg (to get above credentials, without visiting my elgg site)

Why? We are developping a collaborative application, but require a social module. Elgg handles this quite nicely. A user would work on our app and share their work via elgg, elgg would handle the whole social aspect. If I can hack into an elgg API, I could pull this off, but I want a sustainable solution.

I have tried some of the external_html modules (http://elgghacks.com/custom-html/#more-662), thinking I can embed our tool within elgg. However, we need as much real estate as possible, and I can't for the life of me hide the page header, without it being hidden on the entire elgg site (I've overriden views/default/css/elements/layout.php to hide the header via css, but to my surprise it doesn't just hide it on my extranal page, it hides it on the entire site)

 

  • You can take a look at the WebServices APIs of Elgg. Another easy option is to load the elgg engine in to your application and after that, you can use all Elgg API's inside that

  • Thanks so much for the quick reply. I've looked at the WebServices API, however, I'm less enthusiastic for performance reasons (site will be hosted on the same server, so I don't see why I'd run 2 instances of apache and pass JSON between the apps, when I can run it native).

    I'll look into loading the engine, you wouldn't happen to have a link to a guide on how to do this? I'm trying to absorb as much info about Elgg as possible, but it's a bit overwhelming.

     

    Cheers, 

     

    Pierre

  • Thanks, I think I got it. I tried to include engine/start.php but it wasn't working. Eventually I found out that there was a domain name mismatch (127.0.0.1 vs localhost), which was causing the load to fail.

     

    I'm on my way to get this working. Thanks again!

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