elgg

I'm a big fan of Elgg, a free and open source social software that allows you to build your own social networks.  So it is with great surprise to me that I haven't really covered a lot of news about Elgg here at CMSReport.com.  Take a look at a recent post by Dave Tosh for some examples of the latest Elgg powered sites on the Web.  If that's not enough for you to judge how well Elgg can run social media sites...than Dave has more examples of Elgg sites to show you.

Snapshot of Elgg.org

Elgg 1.5 is the latest version of the software with download links available at the official Elgg site.  Hopefully, we'll find more time to cover Elgg in the coming months.

Even for The Register, not a very long article but it does ask some important questions.  The article, Welcome to the world of collaboration by stealth, suggests via questions that collaboration is bigger than the IT department.

Because it involves software, probably the IT department's. But is IT equipped for the task? And does it want the responsibility? Collaboration is a human process, in essence, so surely the buck stops somewhere else - even if IT provides a number of enabling tools.

The article then discusses that collaboration tools may be best implemented "by a few people at a time".  In other words, perhaps the first time social publishing systems are introduced in your organization, it may be best not to implement it through traditional enterprise software.  The article even suggests that Facebook would be a good first collaboration tool. I personally wouldn't go that far (or rather short sighted) with Facebook, however.

Tools such as Drupal, Elgg, or Alfresco are good tools to introduce the the troops to collaboration applications.  You can easily have your workers collaborating though IT without having go full force on an enterprise solution to collaboration.  The topic of CMS and collaboration in the enterprise is something we'll be spending a lot of time on in the coming months.

Although I had a lot of fun this summer, I allowed a lot of commitments to slip though my fingers.  Many of those commitments were made here at CMS Report.  The following is a list of promises that I haven't kept.  My apologies to those that had expected more.

• I never got around to reviewing Barrie M. North's Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (link via Amazon Associate).  My apologies to the author as well as the publicist.

• After all the experimentation and posts I did before the official release of Drupal 6, I never got around to discussing my experiences with the CMS after Drupal 6.0 was officially released.  For now, let me just say that it has been an experience running a site on Drupal 6 with some of the more essential third-party modules still under development (Views, Panels, Subscriptions, etc).

• Elgg's Dave Tosh and I still need to complete that email interview on Elgg 1.0.  Dave was busy and was at first the one slow to respond to emails.  However, during the past two weeks, I've been the been the busy one and the ball is still on my side of the court.

• After two years, I and Deane Barker (Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive) still need to get together for a geek chat.  Depending on the time, I think we owe each other a beer or a cup of coffee.

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