The best open source social networking script I’ve found by far is Elgg. Developed as sort of a “myspace for academics,” Elgg is a powerful social networking solution for any organization. Reasonably easy to install and customize, I’d recommend Elgg for any company or organization that wants to get up and running quickly and inexpensively.
When I say “reasonably easy to install” I mean, not as easy to install as open source web applications like Drupal, Joomla or Oscommerce, but with a little bit of server setting knowledge, and root access to your server, you should have few problems. Installation on a shared server could be a different story. Here are some posts describing some problems, solutions, and addtional info:
Adding Google Analytics to an ELGG Installation
ELGG Social Networking on Shared Hosting
I have a demo up here at http://www.fanclubhelper.com. Feel free to join, set up a community, customize your homepage, and generally test it out.
#1 by Bottlecap Napkin - January 18th, 2008 at 12:39
It seems the Elgg development team has dropped the ball and left a lot of users high and dry on their help forums. For instance, it is not possible, from my experience, to successfully install the Elgg software on 1&1 Hosting servers. 1&1 is a huge hosting provider. Questions posted to the Elgg forum on the subject have gone unanswered for over 4 months. Looks dead to me. I’ve heard DrupalEd is great, so I will be testing that next.
#2 by Anonymous - September 5th, 2008 at 05:59
Elgg one, is great. You should try the new version. The best company for hosting seems to be simpleservers. They did a free install for me within 2 hours of signing up. I was with fasthosts but their support was terrible.
http://www.simpleservers.co.uk/elgg_hosting.php
#3 by Bottlecap Napkin - September 5th, 2008 at 08:34
I agree Elgg is a great program. I’m assuming simpleservers is promoting the fact that they support Elgg, and I have no problem allowing comments that advertise that fact. However Elgg would be a better program if it were easier to install and configure, and you didn’t need to go to a hosting company that had already climbed the learning curve. Ideally you should be able to install it with greater ease on a wider variety of setups, as is true with many other open source software package.
#4 by Marketing Guy - May 23rd, 2009 at 08:39
I agree that elgg has been great for me so far! I have been using it on one of my sites for a couple of weeks now and have been very please with v1.5
I’m actually in the middle of installing it on a 1and1 dedicated server and its going smoothly so far.
#5 by admin - June 4th, 2009 at 21:24
I wouldn’t think there would be a problem on a dedicated server.