This group of pages (and I will add additional ones as I sort out all my notes) are my observation of Elgg based on the creation of a community site.

I have been working on an installation of Elgg for a fishing club with just a few hundred members - so a very small use of the soft ware. My reasons for choosing Elgg is that it most closely resembled Liferay Portal which I have been using to design a much larger, more complex community for a game.

I am not a programmer. If I am anything, I am a community organiser, I suppose, having been involved with the creation and speculation of online communities since the late 1990s. My official job is in advertising where I work as both a composer and a copywriter and have for 30 years - so I have some experience of looking at target audiences and evaluating what they want, need and are prepared to cope with.

In working on Elgg I have been impressed by its simplicity, but equally, I have been frustrated by the lack of easy customisation and core settings that make creating a specific online community intuitive; if there is a constant need to create plugins every time a small variation is required, the process can become cumbersome and alienate non-programmers who may have a better or at least as valid a handle on the needs of the users/client than the tech team.

As a non-programmer, it is very difficult for me to give back to the developers for having used their software for nothing, and indeed to the band of community developers who have brought so many plugins to the table, since I have not the knowledge to contribute to code. But I can offer a careful and friendly analysis of the system from the user and administrator perspective with the hope that either as a whole or in parts it may be of use in the future design of this extremely well conceived application.

I have broken up my comments into a series of subpages. Because of the way the menu system works, these will probably not appear in the order I have written them, so forgive me if they appear to jump around.

As a clue, the first page should be "Defining the Core"

Joss