Currently all the sites I host are indepenent versions of wordpress. I am in the process of setting everything to use mu instead. Well basically it is setup, I just need to build a custom theme for the entry portal blog.

I manage about 400 church's right now, which makes it easy to understand why I am moving to mu. Updating 400 sep wp installs to the new vs took me an entire week. And then 2 days later they came out with another update, which I decided not to do, not wasting another week.

Mu does not really 'share' content between blogs. The entire idea behind mu is that I can manage an unlimited number of blogs on one installation code base. Sites are indepenent of each other. Of course the way wp works, you can export rss from just about anything for each site to share with others through rss widgets.

There is an 'elgg' for wordpress-mu called buddypress from www.buddypress.org but it is NOWHERE near as far along as elgg is, which is why the switch for me to elgg. There is no permission system, photo's, video's, etc... it's still a basic framework.

However if it were complete then there are a ton of buddypress widgets that a user could put into their own blog to bring 'community' information over from bp. So then a users wp blog could show 'global' photo's/videos/wire/users/etc...

I can say though, that after a week of digging through elgg and this site, I am going to make the switch from bp to elgg. With the plugins available here, and the custom code I paid for from izap, elgg should do most of what I want.

I will be hiring either izap or another dev to make a wordpress-mu registration/login plugin for elgg so that everything is unified. Really with the elgg plugin system it shoud be very easy to do this. Meaning my members register/login at wp-mu site, and they are auto registered and logged into elgg. (I have done this with wpmu/vbulletin and it works perfectly).

Then it's a matter of having some custom elgg plugins built as wordpress 'widgets' so I can display the wire/activity/profiles/ from elgg on wp blogs just like bp does.

I'm no expert, but from my basic understanding of elgg, you can use plugins to override virtually anything you want. So theoretically it would be possible to turn elgg into a true wp plugin which would totaly kill buddypress.

If I manage to keep on track I should have a new theme for my wp-mu install ready by this weekend, and will begin importing all my regular wp church customers into the system. At that point there would be something 'real' to show you. Theming in wp is 100x easier than it is in elgg, at least from a newbie standpoint.

Hi Shawn,

There is a multisite plugin, in which you handle only one Elgg instalation and then can have multiple websites, hanging from it.

The thing i don't understand, is why don't you use Elgg Pages or Blogs, why still depend on wordpress ?

Regards,
Uddhava dasa

@Uddhava: Wordpress has so many themes already available that it's very easy for each sepatae site to have its own look. That would require much more work with Elgg. I suspect that WP themes are easier to develop too. If we could get past that problem, it would open up the possibility of having one code base for all of our university sites, and just theme them differently for the local clients. Once you have that and online course functions, then you could port a whole university curriculum to a single instance of Elgg.

Elgg needs native full-text indexing and search! For example, our requirements for user profiles are very high: real full name, recognizable picture and actual location (city, state, country). Also personal and community issues and plans are often discussed in groups. Therefore we do not allow Google to index our pages, but we do want and need full-text search for finding and filtering site content. As our community grows, no one will be able to keep up with all the posts and subjects. Site search is a big priority for us.

Really a great link Uddhava dasa. User interaction improvement was allways a very importat topic for me. Thanks

@Zak

they're called "gurus" ;-)

Yes, anyone who is really advanced in a field of knowledge, being highly intelligent, he understands the importance of helping others who are not yet there. Thus the highly intelligent share by teaching others. They are the head of society. Just like Dave, is the head of Elgg in this little example.

They would be the "Super Administrator", can perform any action within a social group, because of wisdom, they are qualified, and every single action is beneficial to everyone.

With Love,
Uddhava dāsa

We have been kicking around the idea, or actually the requirement, of different roles or categories of users with site privileges according to their demonstrated competence. Most (the 80%) can only read and respond to posts, and update their profiles. The higher levels get additional privileges, especially content generation, as they learn how to be responsible community members.

What we don't want is to make everyone artificially equal, or have the same privileges. We have very clear standards and specific directions that we want to encourage our users to grow toward. So we are implementing roles and a karma point system that grants more privileges to active users, and can also penalize them for spefific breaches of community policy. Also we are considering how to emulate the instructional functions of Moodle within Elgg, so our courses will be on the same platform as our social network.

Fortunately Elgg's architecture is flexible enough that this is possible without extensive customization. Doing the reverse (implementing social networking functionality in Moodle) would be a nightmare.

I agree with you there is definitely room for improvement, but this is a solid start.  I think with a little collaboration the wave plugin would be a great addition to any group.  Especially if it could be edited from Elgg without the user having to create a google wave login.

Your thoughts?

Hi Workpeeps,

Yes, that sounds like a good idea. My other concern, is the data. Inside elgg, all the data is easily backed up. But i haven't seen this in google wave. I think the best application for google wave inside elgg would be a forum, or group discussions. What to you see as possible applications?

With Love,
Uddhava dāsa

Well well!

Guess what? My prediction failed.Today Google announced, that google wave pretty much failed:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29

Oh well. Missed in that one. This one will not fail: The western world will crash. Get ready for huge changes.

With Love,
Uddhava dāsa

"Social Networking and Education - Do they really go together?"

It should -- for people who want it that way. As Baba implied, the scope of Elgg is immense. It has a reach that even the creators of Elgg can't fully predict or envision.

At one level, even simple innovative changes (sans coding power) can make a difference. From the very moment I got into Elgg, I was concentrating on Language. Mere word changes (in english.php, for instance) define a site's mood and influence herd behaviour. Changing "what do you think? (a Facebook epidemic) into something meaningful can prompt an educational ambit. But it's in the hands of Elgg site makers. A versatile script itself can't make a groundswell; or, unfortunately, it can do it only at the risk of undermining its very versatality.

At the other level, plugin makers can do a great deal by avoiding the temptation of gimmicks. Think of a simple informative multiple quiz module. Creating the the basic code is not difficult -- not even for a lightweight (anorexia grade) programming enthusiast like me, but putting into an Elgg plugin is just beyond me. The point I wish to drive home is: Many ace code-hackers dont' have good ideas; and many users with great ideas are poor in programming. If only the two could find each other and work toward useful projects.

A personal note:

Some of my cool programmer friends, notably Carlos and Dhrup, was bemused or baffled by my nearly fanatic attempts to make the Pages plugin exclusive for the Admin (while the users still can have the Pages widget). I was simply trying out to find a solution to put some educational/informative content into my site -- no big deal. At length, Carlos pitched in to help me out. He re-wrote the entire index.php and world.php files in the plugin to suite to my purpose. Using the amount of hours he had spent to understand my programming logic and convert it into Elgg-coding, he could have easily built a plugin.

I hope Uddhava's group will kickstart the idea trend.

Hi Shillo,

Yes, this is the purpose of this group, not to satisfy public opinion, or political behaviour, but to keep it on a very high standard of real tangible progress.

Elgg is succesful precisely because the heads are a very closed group of smart people. And this is how it has to be, otherwise, the whole thing becomes degraded, and it usually ends up in politics and nonstop arguments.

Ideas are the most valuable assets in this information era. At the same time, we need strong coding skills to back it up. There are several people here who will never post anything, but just by hearing the ideas they will start to work on them, and eventually develop them.

There is a very good programmer i know, his name is Steve Fraser, he's very humble but in fact when it comes to programming, he's expert. So please post your ideas here, and we'll work together on them, whatever development we do, we'll contribute to this group. Of course, Steve, has to make a living too, so we are still figuring out how to acomplish this, so that he earns some money.

Programmers tend to be very lonely people, and its expected because they are smart. But usually they lack the vision for web design, and/or user experience. This discussion will spark interest of both, programmers and the idea generators, and in this way we all benefit.

About the Pages plugin, i guess it was fixed by setting pages write permission to private, correct ?

Regards,
Uddhava dasa

Education implies that some people are smarter and/or more knowledgeable than others, and also that one can improve one's knowledge and skills progressively. This also implies some system of levels or grades, each with specific criteria to measure progress. Now how do you adapt these concepts from the closed-source, State-mandated educational gulag that most of us were forced to experience, to the Web 2.0 platform of open-source and social networks?

The implication of grades or levels is that there has to be some friction, some barriers to entry. Not that all users have equal access to all features. If everyone has the same power and privileges, most users will not utilize them, or utlize them for nonsense (e.g. MySpace). Elgg needs a feature for establishing a series of grades and associated privileges, and an automated way to monitor users to see who is smart enough to deserve them. That feature would be fundamental to any educational application, but it does not yet exist in Elgg.

The balance between structure and freedom in an educational environment depends on your pedagogical model, but ultimately it should be a meritocracy: the smarter, better-behaved students should have the most freedom. How do you measure that merit, and how do you implement the friction so that it doesn't counteract the openness that makes social networking so attractive? We need a framework that is configurable so that we can perform the experiments to establish those parameters for a given application.

Baba

So that means, the really first step is to have a nice Roles plugin. A roles plugin was found in the SVN, but someone deleted it from there, it seems that its because they didn't want to share that. We really need to get in contact with the Curverider team, anyone able to reach them ?

Good thing i have a backup of the roles plugin.

Regards,
Uddhava dasa

I had to setup a Full SVN client in my computer, and now i can see all the historical changes, etc. Basically it was Dave who deleted the roles plugin. He used this legend:

removed roles as they are not ready for proper usage

Regards,
Uddhava dasa

By the way, the plugin is now available, if you like this idea.

We payed custom development to Vazco, and now he has released the Karma Rights plugin as a payed plugin.

Still not working for us, but take a look, you might find interesting if you like keeping good content on your site.

Regards,
Uddhava dasa

Well, our community-building experience may or may not be applicable to a FOSS project. But the hurdle we have consistently faced is getting the community members to take responsibility for creating quality content. We solved that by building an online school (using Moodle, but oh well...) for training them in our philosophy and practices, and how to share them using the effective style that we built up over many years of experience.

We found that it is far better for the user experience to have a few very well trained and productive users than many, many poor-quality users. The unenthusiastic users suck the life and energy out of the community and overwhelm the admins with stupid, trivial questions. So any community must establish some threshold to becoming a member, depending on the specific criteria of the group. In a FOSS community, there is a sharp distinction between users and contributors.

There should be some resistance, some friction involved in becoming a community member. Marketing guru Seth Godin writes "The paradox is obvious: to grow, you need to remove friction from the medium. If it's not easy and free to use, people won't. But then it gets big and it becomes profitable, so people use it too much. ... Friction rewards intent and creates scarcity." We estabish barriers to entry, some friction that rewards the more persistent and motivated users. This is key to a really high quality community that rewards you with a net gain of energy.

Baba

I agree, this is the best approach to quality. I guess that people interested in cheating might go for the masses and google ads. But anyone creating a serious social site will want to have quality users.

Elgg suffers from this in their forums for example.

Here's a good blog article called "1,000 True Fans" talks about the concept of quality users:

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize.

First the class, then the mass.

Regards,
Uddhava

I don't know if there is a popular need for this or not but my church is interested in using elgg for many different reasons.  We have a lot of members that are not able to get to our church services due to health reasons so we will be making really good use of elgg.  One thing that I think is missing though is a way to share messages.  Blogging works but is a little to bulky.

Is there a way to show the title of the sermons and scripture passages as links and when you click on the link it will open to the message and also next to the link it has an option to listen to the podcast or mp3. and is there a way to integrate this with video as well?

also.  the events calandar...
Is there a way to add Locations to it such as: City, State, Zip code for like a city guide?  I would like to find a way to link all the church's together and have a central place to link all of the activities together such as Gospel singings, Revivals, Missionaries etc...

Currently all the sites I host are indepenent versions of wordpress. I am in the process of setting everything to use mu instead. Well basically it is setup, I just need to build a custom theme for the entry portal blog.

I manage about 400 church's right now, which makes it easy to understand why I am moving to mu. Updating 400 sep wp installs to the new vs took me an entire week. And then 2 days later they came out with another update, which I decided not to do, not wasting another week.

Mu does not really 'share' content between blogs. The entire idea behind mu is that I can manage an unlimited number of blogs on one installation code base. Sites are indepenent of each other. Of course the way wp works, you can export rss from just about anything for each site to share with others through rss widgets.

There is an 'elgg' for wordpress-mu called buddypress from www.buddypress.org but it is NOWHERE near as far along as elgg is, which is why the switch for me to elgg. There is no permission system, photo's, video's, etc... it's still a basic framework.

However if it were complete then there are a ton of buddypress widgets that a user could put into their own blog to bring 'community' information over from bp. So then a users wp blog could show 'global' photo's/videos/wire/users/etc...

I can say though, that after a week of digging through elgg and this site, I am going to make the switch from bp to elgg. With the plugins available here, and the custom code I paid for from izap, elgg should do most of what I want.

I will be hiring either izap or another dev to make a wordpress-mu registration/login plugin for elgg so that everything is unified. Really with the elgg plugin system it shoud be very easy to do this. Meaning my members register/login at wp-mu site, and they are auto registered and logged into elgg. (I have done this with wpmu/vbulletin and it works perfectly).

Then it's a matter of having some custom elgg plugins built as wordpress 'widgets' so I can display the wire/activity/profiles/ from elgg on wp blogs just like bp does.

I'm no expert, but from my basic understanding of elgg, you can use plugins to override virtually anything you want. So theoretically it would be possible to turn elgg into a true wp plugin which would totaly kill buddypress.

If I manage to keep on track I should have a new theme for my wp-mu install ready by this weekend, and will begin importing all my regular wp church customers into the system. At that point there would be something 'real' to show you. Theming in wp is 100x easier than it is in elgg, at least from a newbie standpoint.

Hi Shawn,

There is a multisite plugin, in which you handle only one Elgg instalation and then can have multiple websites, hanging from it.

The thing i don't understand, is why don't you use Elgg Pages or Blogs, why still depend on wordpress ?

Regards,
Uddhava dasa

@Uddhava: Wordpress has so many themes already available that it's very easy for each sepatae site to have its own look. That would require much more work with Elgg. I suspect that WP themes are easier to develop too. If we could get past that problem, it would open up the possibility of having one code base for all of our university sites, and just theme them differently for the local clients. Once you have that and online course functions, then you could port a whole university curriculum to a single instance of Elgg.