Elgg - Popular And Well-liked Social Networking Platform!

By Author: Jamie Hanson
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Elgg is an open source social networking platform. Elgg offers blogging, community, networking, collection of news with feeds aggregation as well as file sharing features. Everything could be shared amongst users with the access controls and everything could be cataloged by tags also. Elgg, initially developed by David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller in 2004, released its Version 1.0 in 2004 on 18 August. Elgg is certified under the GPL, as well as runs on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform.

With the release of Elgg 1.5, one could now check expansively one's own actions beside friends' actions in the website. A wonderful added feature is that one could manage the actions through a filtering system which Elgg provides. This platform is the easiest to employ when setting-up a social networking site. It appears with a set of the default outline fields which the site administrator could expand or entirely change depending on the requirements of the website or the website users. Users can select from a wide array of accessible widgets using Elgg's widget structure to extend a full profile.

Additional functionality
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... Like some websites, you could monitor how and what your friends are doing via notifying them. The great attribute of Elgg is that you could select the notification process that you feel appropriate for your social networking website. Besides being able to manage or control the actions or activities that you wish to subscribe (yours as well as your friends'), you could have the subscriptions sent to your friends with the notification technique you are most contented with. You can choose to send an internal message, send an email, or send an SMS (which is preffered by Curverider). Other methods could also be added with the help of plugins. There are a lot of Elgg plugins to facilitate you add further functionality to your Elgg core.

Elgg relating to educational sector
Being a student friendly social networking platform to use, elgg has captured loads of attraction from the education institutions like University of Brighton, Claremont Graduate University, University of Leeds, University of Sao Paulo, Graz University of Technology, Hawaii Tokai International College, Oregon State University, amongst others. This platform is even being used in the academic research by these organizations in addition to other collaborating institutions to support its examiners. Elgg is voted as the best social networking platform for the year 2008. This platform authorizes individuals as well as social groups to institute their full-fledged social network supported with well-liked and popular tools, which could customize the site as per the requirements of their businesses.

This open source platform could be used by businesses all around the world to endorse their own community sites. It includes a list of access controls which allow you to generate tiered profiles of the users. Moreover, its tagging features further assist you to classify and store users' profiles. There are many Web Hosting providers in market at present that support Elgg like LimeDomains, BlueHost and FatCow to name a few.

Know more about Elgg Plugin and Elgg Themes at elgg.in