Elgg is an open source social networking platform that gives businesses and organizations the ability to brand their own community sites. With full featured tools for blogging, news aggregation, file sharing and messaging, Elgg is a great solution for building communities on the internet.

Elgg is an open source social networking platform that gives businesses and organizations the ability to brand their own community sites. With full featured tools for blogging, news aggregation, file sharing and messaging, Elgg is a great solution for building communities on the internet. Access controls allow you to set up tiered user profiles, and tagging features provide easy categorization and archival. In development since 2004, Elgg has a large open source community that continues to add value through support and enhancements.

Elgg can be set up for a public community, like a Facebook-styled application, or for internal business purposes as with Microsoft SharePoint. Installation is quick, and allows you to configure basic options like a community name and a directory for user uploads. From there it’s on to the Elgg Dashboard.

Social community building software lives and dies on two broad functions- powerful community management tools and a customizable, feature rich user experience. In both of these areas, Elgg shines. Setting up new users is fast, with e-mail confirmation and the ability to assign admin rights. Users have an active role in developing the community, with more than a dozen plug in tools that can be enabled with a mouse click.

The Spotlight feature allows specific content to be displayed to users as soon as they are on the site. The Activity stream displays updates from you and your friends and contacts, as well as other activity throughout the community. Profiles are robust, with extendable fields and user customizable widget panels. Elgg has multiple notification options, from internal messaging and e-mail to SMS and other methods supported through plug ins. The user status widget allows near real time member updates.

Discussion is a strong community driver, and Elgg promotes discussion with a variety of approaches. Users can create public and private groups, built in blog tools and commenting systems with moderation features, and a microblogging application allow multiple levels of conversation. There’s also a content reporting system for the enforcement of community standards.

Elgg is also a powerful collaboration platform. File sharing supports numerous formats, and the Pages feature allows a group of user to participate in document creation and distribution. Support for external page linking makes it easy to leverage existing site content, and social bookmark sharing lets users make resources available to the community. Elgg is also administrator friendly, with included diagnostics and log generation to analyze performance and maintain security.

If you are looking for a powerful, flexible framework for building or enhancing an online community, Elgg is a great solution. Highly customizable and backed by an enthusiastic and engaged open source community, it’s easy to see why Elgg won the InfoWorld award for best open source social networking platform for 2008.