What's Elgg?

Elgg is a social networking framework. It provides the necessary functionality to allow you to run your own social networking site, whether publicly (like Facebook) or internally on a networked intranet (like Microsoft Sharepoint).

Elgg is an open source product. Not all open source products are free to download, but Elgg is. That means, in its simplest form, Elgg costs nothing at all. This does not mean it's public domain: Elgg is released under the GNU Public License v2, which means the source code is licensed to you. With any software, it's always a good idea to read the license.

To run Elgg, you need to install it in a web server, but if you are a real beginner, you can find a hosting provider that can easily and cheaply do it for you! Search on Google or take a look here! (If you are not new at these things you can find more detailed installation requirements over here).

A certain amount of technical knowledge will make you able to quickly customize your website, but don't worry! Even if you have NO programming skills we are creating this guide for you!

Now we are going to give you a panoramic view of Elgg.

First of all, you can choose between two "packages": the full  Elgg bundle that comes with a selection of plugins pre-loaded, which are listed below, and the core engine, for which you can find a list of available plugins over at elgg.org. Since most of the end user functionality in Elgg comes from plugins, we suggest you the first choice!

Before installation (later we will talk about it) you have to decide if Elgg can fit your needs, so we are going to give you a picture of the default site (the full Elgg bundle).

You have the front page, that's the first page you face before logging in.

Once logged in you are redirected to the main page that shows you All your members or only your Friends' or only yours (Mine) activities. In fact this page is called also Activity page.