Ever since Lincoln announced he is offering readers a chance to guest post on his blog, i was excited. Why? Because i knew Elgg 1.0 was close to being released and being a massive fan of open source social CMS’s, i knew this could be my opportunity to shine! So here i am! For those who don’t know, Elgg originally started as a CMS for creating social networks such as Myspace and Facebook but over the past few years they have grown into much more.

Here is a quote from the elgg.org ‘about us’ page.

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application.

The software is described in full here and can be downloaded and installed locally or taken for a test drive at http://test.elgg.org/

The Groups feature seems much enhanced with ‘pages’ (like wiki pages with optional editing feature), cleaner discussions and files and resources. I set up a test group entitled ‘Social Web Life’ and readers of this blog are welcomed to join this group.

The important finely graduated permissions feature is Intact in the new version The architecture of 1.0 allows for a huge number of widgets and plugins- some installed by individual users, some by site administrators.

The Elgg gang is also celebrating their award from InfoWorld’s best of Open Source Software in the social software category, where the judges write:

You won’t find an open source version of MySpace, but even at the current version, Elgg comes darn close. So why would you even want to create smaller communities? Simple: While Elgg lets corporations, governments, and schools quickly establish blogs, the system’s collaborative features encourage building communities of users with shared interests. Other Elgg fine points include podcast support, file repositories, user profiles, RSS aggregator, and branding features. Significantly, the software integrates with other IT systems and provides OpenID authentication. Developers can add specific functions using an open API”

Congratulations Elgg team. I look forward to creating many more Elgg powered sites into the future.