Packt is pleased to announce the availability of its new book on Elgg, the free open-source tool used to create social networks. Written by Mayank Sharma, the book teaches users to create their own fully customized, hosted social network for their business, organization, or group of friends.

Elgg is an open-source social web application licensed under GPL version 2, and runs on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. It offers a networking platform combining elements of blogging, e-portfolios, news feed aggregation, file sharing, and social networking.

A new version of Elgg, the open source social networking platform, has been released. New features in Elgg 0.9 include:

• New "content" function for static pages editing
• Improved sidebar customization
• Simplified visual installation
• Security improvements
• Refactoring more functions into /mod
• Improved access permissions for admin to all areas/objects

Elgg, an open source social networking platform, opened its development process much wider the past few months. Not every company that goes fully open source benefits from the changes in their license or the changes in how they develop and manage the code. However, open source seems to be treating Elgg very nicely these days.

Since fully opening up Elgg development and having a core team of developers working on it progress has been staggering already in terms of fixes and enhancements, but also in community discussion. Eric S. Raymond's "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" certainly holds true in the case of Elgg, because what may be of most interest is that security issues are being discovered one by one which have been in the code for several releases already.

You can read more about Elgg's experiences with the more transparent development process by reading the rest of Misja Hoebe's post.

Update for Elgg is available to help fix a potential security vulnerability.

A security issue was detected in Elgg versions 0.8 and 0.7 which could potentially lead to a site compromise. Users are encouraged to update their system to release 0.8.1, users using version 0.7 can apply a patch, both available for immediate download from sourceforge.

Original Announcement

Packt Publishing is starting to announce the various winners in its Open Source CMS Awards.  The first category announced was the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

Judges comments for their decisions included:

• WordPress’s ease of configuration, professional approach, usability and enthusiastic community.
• Elgg as a true Open Source Social Networking CMS, its variety of themes and overall user experience.
• Drupal had a long list of positive comments from the judges and was praised as a good overall package.

Winners of the various categories will be announced throughout the week, including Best PHP on October 31st and Overall Winner on November 2nd.

The project managing Elgg, an open source networking platform, announced a couple days ago that the software is "now more open than ever".  The project will be opening "the development process, codebase, direction and software roadmap to the community".

More recently, expected changes at elgg.org were starting to take place with expectations of discussions taking place throughout the week.

This will mean structure both in tools to better support community led development of the software but will also mean putting together procedures how to organise it all.

We would like to look to the community for inspiration on this, so, if you would like the chance to have your theme design become the new default, just let us know."

"I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki, and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they're taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration."

Complete Story