Elgg not has innovation

Elgg plugins need innovation, something that nowadays call more attention of users, type profile images (cover photo) already exists PlugIM to do that but what good does not work or conflict with other plugins already installed, things the User can change when you want, aplications mobile today the world is facing this, Elgg is outdated if not innovate.

  • I disagree. Elgg is the best open source social networking engine. I have yet to find conflicting plugins in either 1.12 or 2.0

    In fact, we built an LMS using elgg with no plugin conflicts. Just browse the plugins' section and you will find a tool for pretty much anything you need.

  • I have to admit, I have had my doubts about Elgg which I had expressed some years ago here.

    But every time I looked around, as recently as a month ago, I have become even more convinced about its robustness, versatility and its community.

    Yes, out-of-the-box, it is still not as good as many of the social network software. Some things (presentation / minor functionality) that social network users accustomed to are missing out of the box. It has only very limited number of good themes etc. I still wish it supported the basics out of the box. It would bring in more customer base (if Alexa rating is an indication, it needs improving). But as it is, Elgg is a very powerful purpose built social network site framework.  It has more varied and powerful plugins than any other similar software I have seen. Yes some of them have been abandoned, or not upgraded to the latest version of Elgg, but this is not very different with any other competing software either.

    The thing with Elgg is, you have a very powerful framework. You can get build a robust site as professional looking as any other, with a budget to spend on new plugins, customization etc. On the other hand, if you have a limited budget, the good news is, the best and the most powerful plugins are free and open source with Elgg. It is just that lack of some presentation or minor features that make it look more amateurish than some what some other software offers. But you know that you have a robust site on day one and you won't hit the wall later, like you would with the other software which give you the head start in the beginning. You know you can have Elgg site improved when you have the budget and get the needed customization on the free plugins or new plugins done with its developer base.

  • part of the problem, from my perspective, is that the early versions of elgg were not designed in a formal way and in a way that was optimised for evolution and expansion. so later updates to the core elgg code have had to be focussed a lot on correcting (or sometimes working around) the inherited glitches and oversights. the other aspect, is as was already said, that elgg is a framework and as such it has many features that are only needed in a framework and thus are developer features that casual users do not know about. when combined with the (probably) total absense of direct finance for the core developers for working on the core and the small team involved, you can understand why the elgg core has it's limitations still.

    i feel that the main blockage is (ironically) a lack of unified community here at elgg.org among the users and coders. the coders often don't want to or can't participate so much because there are so many noob questions coming at them from non coders and there has always been a lack of coherent project management with regards to the creation of new plugins and features among the community.

    maybe with a bit of funding or renewed passion, the community here could be upgraded to provide a better framework for the design, implentation and TESTING of new plugins and upgrades? that funding and support can come from anyone, regardless of their skills.

  • I agree on the part that plugins need innovation, but disagree that Elgg needs innovation. Elgg core is speeding at a level where a lot of plugin developers cannot keep up with. And as a result a lot of plugin developers are lacking behind and making the gap bigger.

    But the core developers should continue anyway, so the framework becomes faster, more stable and code dependancy mgmt is properly handled (pretty much done with autoloader and composer)

    Performance is still a bit of concern, but things (like mobile support)  you mentioned are not. We are building a very huge mobile site (as native app) with Elgg as backend. So far, we think we made the right choice. And even with native Elgg you have pretty good mobile support with the Aalborg theme.

    UI/UX has indeed never been the best part of Elgg plugins and there are other areas of concern for developers to more easily adopt it. Speaking for myself, Elgg is hard on finding what code is responsible for whatever issue you have. Even simple things like wrong CSS are quite hard to debug in Elgg where it is coming from.

    If any suggestion to core it would be that. Make it more simple to know what code or plugin is actually responsible for handling the output.

    And to the plugin developers who are still waiting for Elgg to settle down, I'd say don't and start picking up the work you have done in the past and move it on forward.

  • Yeah, it's the classic case of considering Elgg the product instead of the tool to build the product.

    I've got a lot of mobile friendly elgg sites running, as well as some that are providing the data modeling for mobile apps.  UI is what you make of it, out of the box it's a little plain and unimpressive but the important part is that it's un-opinionated and easy to override which gives you the option to diversify quickly.

    With regard to difficulty finding code/css sources that probably comes with experience and using the right tools.  Elgg comes with a number of tools to inspect views/hooks/events/actions and there's a number of developer plugins floating around that extend that (eg. hypeDBExplorer)  It's not something I usually struggle with.