What Elgg Can Do and Not Do
By Paul Smith
I am trying to figure out what the Elgg platform is capable of and what it isn't capable of. I have this idea where a community of like minded individuals from around the world use the platform similar to a facebook group but I need full control. What I mean is I would like to limit the blog feature only to me and some others I may designate at a later date. I wanted to create sub groups inside groups also but not sure if I have to create a plugin for this. Don't want the members to be able to create groups if possible. Is this platform capable of achieving what I want or have I misunderstood how it works?
Thanks for your time and hard work.
Feedback and Planning
Discussions about the past, present, and future of Elgg and this community site.
- Nikolai Shcherbin@rivervanrain
Nikolai Shcherbin - 1 like
- Paul Smith@nootkan
Paul Smith - 0 likes
- Nikolai Shcherbin@rivervanrain
Nikolai Shcherbin - 0 likes
- Paul Smith@nootkan
Paul Smith - 0 likes
- Nikolai Shcherbin@rivervanrain
Nikolai Shcherbin - 0 likes
- Paul Smith@nootkan
Paul Smith - 0 likes
You must log in to post replies.Everything you've mentioned works to some degree on some of the apps we've developed for our customers. Some features are also used in our own apps.
The only thing you'll have to deal with is the lack of ready-made plugins for the latest Elgg version.
You'll need to either develop them yourself or hire developers.
For groups, start with this great plugin.
This is 'must have' plugin for group control.
PS: After 15 years of working exclusively for Elgg, I have come to the conclusion that Elgg can do anything. Unless make you coffee :)
Nikolai, thanks again for your reply. One more question if I may? Why is there a separate admin dashboard from the administrators page? For example cannot create new groups from the administration dashboard but can from the administrators page. A little confusing when trying to set things up for me.
What you call the "administrators page" is actually the user's page (profile). It doesn't matter whether he is the site administrator or not.
The admin panel (dashboard) is a page for managing the site and its settings.
Historically, Elgg has used this approach to create UI.
Nikolai, thanks again. So you're saying that the administrator created when installing Elgg (me) is automatically given a user profile page like every other user who registers? So, how is he able to stop other users from becoming administrators themselves when they register and from accessing certain privileges/pages/events/functions etc? I am having a tough time wrapping my head around how the platform works. Thanks again for your time.
I won't make a tutorial here, you can always ask a more specific question here.
As for administrator privileges, everything is controlled through the user entity menu (3 vertical dots)
With 'Developer tools' plugin activated, you can examine all the metadata and attributes of any entity via 'Entity explorer' tool.
You can also use 'Login as' feature.
Sorry to have upset you. I will just move on. Thanks