Social networking giants like Face-book and MySpace have become extremely popular today. And enterprises have realized the potential of social media and started to deploy social networking tools for their internal usage. Social media tools like blogs. wikis, forums, etc. 'have already made a headway into the' intran'ets of enterprises:

Many organizations having e-commerce businesses use social networking tools to develop specific communities on their sites to create a loyal customer base. Elgg is one such social networking tool that can be used to create a full fledged social networking website to be run publicly or within an enterprise.

About Elgg

Elgg is an open source social networking framework that provides the func¬tionality to create fully-featured social networking websites. It allows users to be at the center of their activities from where they can collaborate. share and communicate with other users. Elgg comes with an impressive feature set in the form of plugins. These plugins offer various social networking functionalities lik blog. book marking. tagging. message board. activity tracking. notifications. etc;. The administration con¬trol panel of a site created with Elgg is easy. and has a very advanced user management and administration control panel.

The administrator can easily setup the default user profile by dragging and dropping the widgets and filling out the information. Upon logging in a user an also change and even add new widgets to his profile. thus providing users with customization privileges.

Elgg comes as a package of social networking tools instead of having a collection of different social networking solutions. Elgg can be used to create a complete social networking website with multiple' view support feature which allows the content to be viewed on mobile applications as well as traditional web browsers.

Getting started
To run an Elgg based site. you require a combination of Apache Web server. MySQL as its database server. and PHP. With this month's DVD. we have provided the latest version of Elgg. Since a combination of Apache. MySQL and PHP is needed to run Elgg. the DVD also contains WAMPServer, which is a single installation package for Apache. MySQL and PHP. thus providing simpler and easy administration of all these three prerequisites.

There are few requirements that need to be met before starting the Elgg installation. One. the Apache Web server needs to be installed with mod rewrite and PHP 5 modules land MySQL should be of version 5 or later. You also need PHP 5.2 or later. With this latest release of WAMPServer, we are able to meet all these requisites. First by installing WAMPServer, we will have Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.1 and PHP 5.2 versions installed, which will satisfy the Elgg requirements to run. Now before starting the Elgg installation, we have to add the rewrite and PHP 5 module to Apache web server. To add these modules, click on the system tray icon of WAMPServer. And from the menu, select Apac;he and then from the submenu, select Apache modules. A list of available modules will be shown.By scrolling down, select the 'rewrite module' and 'php5 module' from the list.

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Installing Elgg
Once we have setup the Web server and added the required modules, we can proceed with Eigg' installation. Eigg comes as a zipped package, so if you want to install Eigg in your root domain, just extract the content of the Elgg zipped folder into the document root directory of the web server.

Besides, if you want to have a social networking facility added to your existing site, you can then add the extracted Eigg folder as a subdirectory to the root domain. In our case, we will install Eigg on a local Web server, and will keep it as a subdirectory. We will extract the Eigg folder and upload the content of that folder

Eigg provides a feature of file sharing whereby users can upload files and share them across other users on the board. For this, Elgg requires a separate folder to be created where such uploaded files, their thumbnails and also the profile icons will be stored. Create a folder named as 'data' outside of the document root folder where you have installed Elgg. And once the folder has been created, make sure that you have enabled the write permission to it.

Now using WAMServer's phpMy Admin, we'll create a new database for Elgg and name it as 'elgg'. Also we'll have to create a new user 'elgg' that will have administrative privileges for the data base 'elgg'. This database name, user name and password will be required by the installer while going through the Elgg installation process.

Setting up Elgg
Once the initial steps have been performed, you can visit your Elgg site on the web browser. You can now configure Eigg to be your own social networking website. After providing the database details in the welcome page, you will be prompted for the system settings on the next page. Here you can provide a name for, your website, also you'll have to provide the path of the directory where the uploaded files will be stored. Now from the following setup page, you can create a administrator for the website. Once the administrator logs in from the Tools Administration, he can enable and configure various plug ins that will be installed for the website, like blogging, bookmarking, etc. Once the plugins are installed, the default page for the website can be configured by simple drag and drop of widgets.

Eigg can not only be used as an internal social networking site for enterprise usage, but can also be used by companies with e-commerce websites. Adding a social networking facility to their existing website will enable them to have a platform where they can create user communities for their products and interact with their users.