This is more of a rant than a tutorial, so forgive me if you are searching a solution and this doesn’t help you.

As far as open source web applications go, Elgg is pretty difficult to work with. It’s buggy, there are a lot of compatibility problems, and support from the development team and the community is less than stellar. The application is, however, very powerful, and has many functions that make it the best choice, in my opinion, for an open source social networking web application.

After some difficulty, I got my installation at http://www.fanclubhelper.com up and running. Being afraid to touch it again, for fear I’d open up a can of worms, I didn’t make any modifications for over a year. In that time, however, the site started ranking well in some searches I’m interested in, and it was now time to install Google Analytics, to see how the traffic was doing.

In most open source software applications I’ve used, in order to make changes, such as adding Google Analytics tracking code, you edit the template file. So I went to /mod/template/templates/MyTemplate/pageshell and pasted the Google Analytics code before the closing body tag. In checking the live site, however, the code was not installed.

Since the closing body tag needs to be coming from somewhere, I took a shot in the dark and added the Google Analytics code to the pageshell file of the default template. That worked, but I have no idea why. It also had the side-effect of putting some text over my logo where it wasn’t before. I can only guess that one of the pageshell templates I put was different on the server than my local copy, and I forgot about it during the year of inactivity. Another ELGG mystery that I’d rather not get into. It’s working well enough, so no touchy!!

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.

I’m currently testing out some open source social networking web applications that compare to Myspace. The most promising at the moment seems to be Elgg (don’t ask me what it means). AroundMe looks good too, but I read a comment on their blog that it wasn’t quite ready yet.

Elgg is a little more difficult to install than other open source applications out there. That is, if you are installing it on a shared hosting account. There are two obstacles you will need to overcome. First of all .htaccess is probably not enabled for your account, and when the Elgg .htaccess starts trying to do things, your server will choke with a 500 Server Error. So you need to have your hosting support person enable .htaccess for the directories you will install Elgg in.

That’s not all though. My host (hostmysite.com) didn’t like the following in the Elgg .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

These are mod_rewrite directives. They had me comment them out and added the statements to their own special configuration file. My current .htaccess just has the Rewrite rules listed.

I found a lot of posts from people looking for installation support for this issue, and what a lot of the well intentioned developers trying to help didn’t understand (or didn’t communicate) is that these seemingly simple settings can become complex on shared hosts. For security, processes can be disabled, or configuration can be more complex than if you own your own box.

Hopefully this helps anyone having 500 server errors when installing Elgg on a shared host.

Check out my Elgg installation at Fan Club Helper