The Social Connect plugin allows your Elgg users to connect to your website through practically all known external social networks. With Social Connect users can easily register for a new account on your Elgg website using Facebook, Google+, MySpace, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Windows Live, and many more. But also the Social Connect plugin simplifies the login process of existing users, that can now access your Elgg installation via all of the supported networks.

Version 1.1 addresses a few minor bugs and makes it even easier to use the plugin with a new option in the settings that specifies the desired default response to the social_connect,user hook:

• Always: social connection is always allowed
• Never: social connection is never allowed (use this only if you have a plugin that could change the response)
• Once per email: the email address is checked against the Elgg user database and if it already exists the corresponding user is connected
• Only with email: same as Once per email, but if an email address is not provided by the social network (for example, Twitter) then social connection will fail.

In the OpenID settings, you can now also specify an Identity Provider URL without the need for a separate Elgg plugin. This is another important improvement over the previous version.

In version 1.1.1 you can choose whether newly registered users receive an email notifying them of the generated password to access their Elgg account without going through social connection. Also, new versions of the plugins are now registered with the Version Check plugin (included with Social Connect).

In version 1.1.2 you can decide whether social connection is available for registration and/or login, and there is an option to enable a hack for Facebook when using self-signed certificates in Elgg with SSL. Also, Social Connect now ships with an updated version of Version Check (which will be released on its own shortly...)

If you are an Elgg developer, Social Connect gives you as much control as you need by triggering hooks and raising events as users are registered, connected or logged into the system.

Make sure you check out the plugin homepage for a detailed explanation of the development features of this plugin.

Social Connect uses HybridAuth as the connection engine and was loosely inspired by the elgg_social_login plugin.

It currently supports the following social networks (known as "providers" in the plugin):

• OpenID
• Google
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• Windows Live
• LinkedIn
• Foursquare
• AOL

And even more social networks can be added with the additional providers offered by HybridAuth. The underlying HybridAuth engine is always kept up-to-date, so as to give you the best and most reliable authentication engine.

If you like this plugin, please recommend it: it's always good to know whether people appreciate what you did ;-)