Other vs Elgg if found on google.

i found on google about others vs elgg http://othersvselgg.wordpress.com/ please tell me which cms should i use? because my website is large so there is migration problem please advice me that which cms is better Thanks in advanced

  • speedy snail - u r a little not so speedy upstairs; didya know that that little piece of code was first written in august 2008? almost last century.

  • Dhrup, sometimes existing code gets updated with new features and unit test improvements. All this boring testing and bug fixing is what makes software stable.

    The bulk of development now occurs in individual github forks and pull requests which get thoroughly reviewed and tested before being merged into the stable branches. For a lot of changes we try to get a 2nd opinion, which can slow things down. We definitely can grease the wheels of this process.

  • I think the solution would be to turn out some killer plugins. Dig deep. The core guys can't be expected to do everything. It's up to us to make Elgg shine. Even if they're gone, we can keep it alive. Make the stuff so tasty that people will want to check it out. Bend it. Break it. (OK, enough cheesy two-word phrases...) Think outside the docs.

  • Let's be honest. Elgg is a dead-beat software. 

    Half the people here are developers looking to make money from the other half which are trying to jump in on the social network craze. Elgg will never reach the popularity of Wordpress, and we all know the reason. Not only that, social network features are now added into multiple softwares that are simply better than Elgg.

    One key statement I once heard was I ski to where the puck is going not where it has been. Elgg is trying to reach where the 2003 Facebook software has been - or trying to fullfill that 2003 dream from some non-programmer.

    The reason for Elgg sucking compared to Wordpress is simple.

    1. Elgg is not user friendly: You think you got a great innovatitive software but no one uses it. And they can't make money from it AS IS (don't give me the 1% of the population thing)
    2. Elgg wants to be unique but makes it difficult for developers. So you got to learn all this "elgg" procedures and then when the programmer does learn it, they charge customers thousands of dollars for one simply plugin that should half been available in the package.
    3. Elgg cost heavily for servers and making it stable for even the smallest site. It's not "newbie" friendly and people that start sites are newbies not developers. Don't fight it, a software is made for people that can't make softwares dah. And people that can't make software and want to start a site usually don't have money.

    All in all Elgg is terrible. I wasted a year learning it then finding out that both SEO, Speed, Cost is not worth the return on investment. 

    The only successful person I heard that essentially used Elgg is DhrupDeScoop  and I can't verify that. Other people probably altered Elgg and customized it but that's not easy to do. With wordpress everything is out of the box and you can start earning knowing it won't cost you an arm and a leg.

    I know I'll have a lot of developers flaming me because they want more people to use Elgg so they can charge them $100 per line of code but the truth is the truth.

    I'll give you the simple stats too. Elgg was founded in 2003-2004 don't remember the dates about there. So was wordpress and other CMS. the development of Elgg is beyond slow. Facebook was founded around that time. Elgg's structure is not keeping up with today's standards speaking in reality.

    And I'll tell you why.

    Elgg is difficult to develop, navigate, use, etc etc but lastly is this. Find information. I had to click almost three-four different slots to even get to the feed. And it was confusing.

    Save your time and money. If you want a social network and don't have money then find something easier to manage but know that you ain't going to be Facebook or Twitter or Google+ the time is gone. Regardless, elgg the big hidden portion is You need a VPS or Dedicated server to run elgg well.

    I can stick 20-30 WP site with 30,000 visitors /day on 1 site and still do fine on shared hosting. Elgg will break shared servers at about 100 or less. So you'll be spending money any way, and more money especially all the crazy prices for "worthy" and not useless plugins here.

    That's my 2 cents.

    And 1.8 is the worst upgrade of all CMS. Thanks for marking all your CSS with Elgg in front that just makes it harder for users to customize it right? another reason why your focus is wrong. That's no different from a Wordpress plugin with some guy adding their links and information at the bottom of the wordpress site and giving no options to remove it unless you know code. God I hate that.

  • i am working away late nights on http://community.elgg.org/pages/view/1077799/nexgen-plugins-and-themes-for-elgg to propel elgg... one could say.. in a manner (of fact) - i'm gonna 'take over the whole dwang show' when the toff gets going! & dat'll teach them ;) they didn't listen, they're not listening still. maybe.. they never will.

  • @leon

    you ain't going to be Facebook or Twitter or Google+

    I don't think it would be realistic to try to create a social network like those using any existing software. This would require very highly customized software, decentralized data centers etc. Around 90% of my clients don't even have a public Elgg site. Instead the clients are companies, organizations and schools which use Elgg in a private network. And for this Elgg is a very good platform.

    And they can't make money from it AS IS

    Making money is not the only reason to get Elgg. Most of the clients use it as a non-profit tool to collaborate and to share information and ideas inside their organization.

    It's not "newbie" friendly and people that start sites are newbies not developers.

    I'm a developer and I start new Elgg sites for new clients quite often actually. :)

    Elgg is trying to reach where the 2003 Facebook software has been - or trying to fullfill that 2003 dream from some non-programmer.

    The goal of Elgg is not to be a perfect community site out of the box but instead have all the APIs that devs need to customize it into anything the client needs. Making it work exactly like Facebook or Google+ by default would require us to abandon much of the flexibility.

    And 1.8 is the worst upgrade of all CMS.

    I was a bit tired of developing for Elgg 1.7 but Elgg 1.8 restored my motivation! :)

    Thanks for marking all your CSS with Elgg in front that just makes it harder for users to customize it right?

    Why does this make it harder? The elgg prefix is there for reason. Lets say that some html element in Elgg has a class "list". Then you include some third-party software that also has the class "list". If they have different css for those classes, either one of those lists is going to break since it uses the wrong css meant for the other list. However if you name the other "elgg-list" then you don't have to worry about something getting broken. Most web application do this to avoid name conflicts like this.

  • @leon : first understand the difference b/w Elgg and Wp.

    WP needs to satisfy only a single person, the site admin. As the site admin if you are happy with the default theme and the navigation system in WP, then thats enough for you. Your users wont care about the look/feel/functionality of your wordpress site. They came there just for informations which are provided through simple texts.

    Incase of Elgg the site is not for a single person, its for a community. Even if you feel that the elgg default theme is enough for your site, it wont be accepted by your users. Same with any custom developed theme/functionality. With Elgg you have to satisfy all the users in your site.

    The same difference applies for other areas also. For example regarding the server resource usage, in WP you can keep on serving cached and saved pages to your users for even weeks. But whats the purpose of serving a cached and saved page in a social network which is more than a week old? So pages in Elgg has to be regenerated every time.

    Seems all other issues are answered by Juho.

  • Leon, I know some quite successfull Elgg-based projects. Some examples:

    http://www.mgogolf.com/ - this site is online for 3 years. It is being constantly developed, they released mobile app recently. It's really interresting website, quite usefull and looks great. It is built on core and custom plugins. It earns a lot more than just for it's support.

    http://spotwork.fr - online for over 2 years, still running on Elgg 1.7, quite successfull from business standpoint.

    Also, using Elgg as intranet is a very good idea and it pays back quickly.

    I worked personally on over 200 Elgg-based projects, they mostly fail due to poor management, no marketing, no business model and sometimes poor quality. It's the same for any out-of-the-box software.

    If you use Elgg out of the box, it's medicore - just like Wordpress or Buddypress would be. Lack of cheap commercial plugins or good quality OS plugins make it a hard experience then. If you use it as a base platform on which you develop what you need, it's superb though. It's extremely flexible then. In such cases it can be cheaper and more efficient than other software.

    You're right Elgg could use some optimizations, although it already handles a lot more than 100 visitors/day. Our website and intranet which run on pure Elgg could handle approx. 10k. unique visits/day without a hickup.

    It's complex to optimize Elgg, although it's possible.  We optimized our Elgg install to handle 300 requests per second on a local server for cached pages, which is quite amazing (you could probably transfer it to handing approx. 250k unique visits per day on a P4 "server"). It's a few dozen times better than Wordpress or Buddypress.

    You're right in one thing - Elgg certainly needs some great success stories. If everything goes well, I plan to provide a few of such success stories in a few months :)

  • Having a showcase page here in the community site would be really helpful for people who are trying to decide which platform to use.

    There's already a ticket about this in Trac:

    http://trac.elgg.org/ticket/3134

    I would work on this if I didn't already have so many other projects in the making. Any other volunteers? :)

  • I think all this Elgg bashing is healthy; bring it on!

    Elgg definitely seems to be more attractive to programmers than users (as long as the data model fits, I feel more productive than in most systems I've coded for), and that needs to change via hard work put into the default UI.

    Elgg needs to be more efficient, especially with more caching in the not-logged-in case, where large chunks of markup--and entire pages--can/should be cached (WordPress is fast because those 10K "users" aren't users; they're anonymous readers). Give WordPress 10K users who're all logged in and demand unique content posted by their friends, and every piece of content is access-controlled, etc. and it will get slow, too.

    Maybe Elgg needs some sharding-type optimization for data designated public/logged-in-users, that can query it more efficiently. I do know with Elgg 1.8.9 memcache will become usable (access bypass fixed) and with a little work we can adapt that system to cache to disk or APC. 

    More Elgg devs need to eat our own dog food. I've hosted my personal site on WordPress since 1.2 or something. I think if Elgg had a simple plugin to turn it into a traditional blog (home page is aggregated blog posts, etc.) we could start courting more front-end designers who might use it on their own site. WP has served the designer community well for personal home pages and I think part of WP's success has been due to the work of designers and UI experts.

    It's not Elgg's fault that it appeals to those who who have little resources, but want to be the next big social network. Nothing we can do about that.

    Elgg needs a built-in capability system BADLY. Arck roles is a huge step forward, but bumps up against internal limitations. Drupal's system is simple to understand, but lacks contextual differentiation (e.g. roles within groups). Moodle's is fully contextual, with those contexts being nested and allows overrides and tie-breaking when multiple roles exist in a context. Elgg needs to find the sweet spot and a system that gels well with the permissions system it already has. Item visibility is always going to be a problem here (we can't make the access query modification any more complex), but in practice it's probably OK. First we must shed all the if (admin) {} type of thinking, and start thinking named capabilities.

    How else does Elgg suck? :)