Elgg Social Networking: Create and manage your own social network site using this free open-source tool (From Technologies to Solutions) [Paperback]

Mayank Sharma (Author)

Book Description

Series: From Technologies to Solutions | Publication Date: March 28, 2008

If you are looking to create your social networking site by tomorrow, then this book is for you. You will be equipped with a social networking site even before you are through this book. You don't have to be a hard-core programmer to do this. All you need is a computer with an internet connection and this book. This book is aimed at people interested in social networking and e-learning teachers.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mayank Sharma is a contributing editor at SourceForge, Inc's Linux.com. He also writes a monthly column for Packt Publishing. Mayank has contributed several technical articles to the IBM developerWorks where he hosts a Linux Security blog. When not writing, he teaches courses on Open Source topics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, as guest lecturer.

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (March 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847192807
• ISBN-13: 978-1847192806
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,127,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of money & time ... completely useless!!!, December 20, 2008

By 

Nosirb "The Scientist" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Elgg Social Networking: Create and manage your own social network site using this free open-source tool (From Technologies to Solutions) (Paperback)

This books is well written but completely useless. The directory structure is totally different than my install, making the tips here completely useless. None of the customizations work with my version and installation of elgg. A book on Microsoft Excel Macros would be as helpful as this @$#^&/.

Very disappointed!!!

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars do-it-yourself Web 2.0, May 31, 2008

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Elgg Social Networking: Create and manage your own social network site using this free open-source tool (From Technologies to Solutions) (Paperback)

The recent rise of the so-called Web 2.0 has been driven by the success of sites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. All of these are, thus far, closed sites, with massive IT personnel support and data centers. In contrast, what Elgg offers is a way for a single enthusiast of a hobby or subject to rev up her own social website.

Much of the book is taken up with GUI issues. Demonstrating numerous aids for quickly and easily setting up your community and administering it. It looks quite competently done, and there is not much point me going into the low level details of what is available. You should troll the book yourself to find out.

But Elgg is more than just about building a website on a machine. One nifty outreach feature it possesses is for you to search for people. Not restricted to your website. It can go to a central site, Ubuntero, and scan it. The idea here is to enable your website to be more than just a standalone node on the Internet. To be sure, this external searching is somewhat limited, from what I can discern in the text. Nice as far as it goes. However, Elgg developers might [or should] take this idea further. It doesn't have the sheer sweep of Google's search. I realise that the latter is for arbitrary searching on the Web. While the Elgg searching has a more focused objective.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elgg Social Networking - Book Review, June 12, 2008

By 

Luke Forshaw (Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Elgg Social Networking: Create and manage your own social network site using this free open-source tool (From Technologies to Solutions) (Paperback)

The book is meant to act as both an introduction to Elgg in general (it's a locally managed social network that you can build) and to getting the software up and running on a LAMP or WAMP machine. By approaching the writing in this way, Sharma does a terrific job in scaling up the technical discourse as the book progresses. For example, the first few chapters outline some of the simple social networking features (friends list, profiles, tag clouds) for people who are new to the world of social networking.

Where the text shines is in it's simple, yet effective scaffolding of difficulty as it progresses into more complicated functions of Elgg like customization of your profiles, CSS and in managing and installing plug-ins. The entire text is beautifully supported by helpful images that connect the particulars of a given passage to a concrete example.

Sharma's writing style; direct, simple and clean, really help direct the reader through the text in a way that makes the digestion of all of these potentially new and exciting ideas seem easy.

My favorite section of this book is potentially the most complex section to write about, installing the software on a local machine in order to act as a server. The world of LAMP, (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) can seem daunting to new users setting up a computer. Sharma's easy to follow text, littered with helpful illustrations makes the seemingly esoteric steps involved in setting up LAMP seem simple and manageable. Thanks for the great read! I know that when Elgg version 1.0 drops this summer, I'll have this text handy as I set up a new install to play with!