Social Network for Students

Hi,

A friend of mine told me about Joomla but it seemed to be more for websites than a social network for students.

I guess after looking at Joomla the past month I understand components and plugins and templates. Is Elgg similar but focussed towards social networking?

I'd be creating this for students who would also have a support network to help them give them ideas of each other and be able to upload pictures and word documents.

Kári

  • Welcome to Elgg. You are right, joomla is a CMS solution. Elgg is an out of box social network framework. Download a copy of Elgg > Find a host and you can have your own community. With plugins and themes you can change how elgg works and looks. 

  • Well, Elgg is a good framework for education. Using the right tools, you can get your students network up and running:

    - CSV user Upload Plugin

       To upload all of your students and avoid user registration

    - Groups Plugin

       To have classrooms and such

    - Groups Tool Plugin

       To moderate the groups.

    Rodolfo Hernandez

    Arvixe/Elgg Community Liaison

     

  • Kari, I have been where you are. I started 8 months ago looking for a CMS that would help me create a specialty social network. It's basically down to Buddypress or Elgg. I am trying to make Elgg work. I'm just not comfortable with Buddypress for what I'm trying to build. I tried so many CMS, probably 150. Some cost too much, some are too hard to work with, some have a poor admin interface, some are free but the add-ons cost too much. Joomla has Community Builder which is not free. I'm not using it because I just can't acquire a good feel for Joomla. I researched and decided that Community Builder (and Joomla) has too many reports of unreliability and unnecessary difficulty, and costs are high. Elgg is very solid and I have a good feel for it, and I'm still learning. Elgg is free as are the plugins and has a welcoming and helpful community. I'll probably hire one of the Elgg plugin makers to customise Elgg for me, you might think about that yourself. Elgg is extremely easy to theme and has many different types of plugins. It's a very positive statement that after 8 months of research and testing, I'm working with Elgg. It's greatness is very subtle. You could try Mahara or Moodle. I have chosen Elgg. You could look at some sites powered by Elgg here -http://elgg.org/powering.php. Good luck to you.

     

  • That was a quick response, thank you. Team Webgalli, it's good to see that this is related towards what I want the site to do, rather than force something to do something that it isn't designed to do like Josephs experience. I know about Community Builder, and it seemed to be very complex.

    rjcalifornia, it's good that this uses plugins and thanks for suggesting. I'll setup a host, see how it all goes.

    Thank you all. Will keep you updated.