How to Build Your Own Social Network with Elgg?

Jaakko Naakka Intunex Ltd. www.intunex.fi @naakka How to Build Your Own Social Network? Custom made social networking with Elgg - A technical perspective

Jaakko Naakka

I really like the idea of Facebook and Twitter , but I need more privacy . How can I build a private social networking site?

With Elgg you can!

I want to build a public social community with thousands of users. Is that possible?

It sure is! It's been done already

What is Elgg?
An open source social networking engine
You can create your own
Private social networking for your organisation,
Public world wide social networking sites

Still not convinced? Here's some more details why Elgg rocks...

Elgg Highlights in TLA's
*AMP
PHP
SQL
MVC
ORM
XML
RPC
GPL / MIT
OMG!

Elgg is an easily extendable platform to build your custom social networking site

Extendability
Not just the way you can extend and modify any Open Source project
Very effective plugin system
Plugins can modify , extend and disable
core features ,
features added by other plugins

Lets take a closer look at the plugins

Plugins can add new features to Elgg Elgg Core Blog User profile Groups Plugin Plugin Plugin

Plugins can modify Elgg core features Elgg Core Blog Groups Email validation Plugin Plugin User profile Plugin Plugin

Plugins can modify other plugins Groups Elgg Core Blog Group members Plugin Plugin User profile Plugin Email validation Plugin Plugin

You can do practically anything without modifying Elgg core or losing upgradeability

How is that possible?

Ways to Extend and Modify Elgg
You can replace or extend any view in Elgg
A plugin can replace page handlers and actions
Add functionality through events and plugin hooks

Elgg is built on MVC architecture
Plugins can modify views and change the way things look like. You can
Add new views,
Replace any core view,
Replace any view added by another plugin,
Extend any existing view

Actions and page handlers
You can add new or replace existing actions and page handlers
Actions handle user actions (e.g. log in, save a blog post, update user profile)
Page handlers handle the calls to URL's

Events and plugin hooks
Events and plugin hooks are an easy way to add new features
By registering an event handler you can, for instance
Add a new authentication method,
Execute some code every time a user updates their profile,
Send an email to administrators every time a new user is registered

What about the database and saving data?

Elgg Datamodel
Everything is saved as entities , metadata , annotations , and relationships
You don't need to
Know any SQL at all,
Create your own plugin specific tables

How does that work exactly?

This is all the code you need to save a blog post title and contents
Example, saving a blog post // Get the form input $title = get_input('title'); $body = get_input('body'); // Create a new blog post object $blogpost = new ElggObject(); $blogpost->title = $title; $blogpost->description = $body; $blogpost->subtype = "blogpost"; // Save to database. // This is where the magic happens ! $blogpost->save();

Cool! What about reading the database?

Example, reading the database
This is what you need to get the latest 10 blog entries
$options = array( 'type' => 'object', 'subtype' => 'blogpost', 'limit' => 10 ); $blogposts = elgg_get_entities($options);

That sounds cool! Where do I start?

Elgg Community
http://www.elgg.org
Hundreds of free plugins
Active discussion forums
Friendly and helpful members

Need something custom made?
Don't hesitate to contact me!
[email_address]
http://www.naakka.net
http://www.intunex.fi
@naakka / @intunex
http://www.facebook.com/intunex

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How to Build Your Own Social Network with Elgg?

by Jaakko Naakka

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