Elgg is designed for social networking

Elgg 1.0 has officially left the building. As we've already announced, it comes in two flavours: a full version with lots of features pre-installed, and a core designed for you to build your own social networking application on top of.

The archive for the full version is 1.43Mb - small enough to fit on a floppy disk, if anyone still used them. The core-only archive weighs in at less than 700k. Elgg is fully-featured and extremely powerful both to run as a stand-alone social network and as a basis for programming on top of. So why is it so small?

Elgg was founded in 2004, and - as is common with open source projects - we slowly released software with version numbers from 0.1 through to 0.9 over a period of three years. This was an evolution of the same codebase, and as we came up with new ideas and learned new lessons, we churned the code back into the core. We could have continued to do the same, but the feature list and what we wanted to do was so different by the end of last year that we made a brave decision: we rewrote from scratch.

Because of that, we could incorporate everything that was important to Elgg - granular access permissions, cross-site tagging, an emphasis on personal ownership - while adding an extremely consistent API layer, an internal event system unmatched in any web application, and extra functionality that we think is necessary to power the next generation of social applications, right into the core. While many applications take a simple beginning and try and duct tape social networking and next-gen features over the top, we started again. And as a result, Elgg is fast, flexible, extensible and ready to power the next evolution of social technology. It's not just the most popular open source social networking platform; we believe it's the best.

There's been a lot of talk about open source social networking recently, and a lot of you are doubtless wondering what makes Elgg different. The answer is this: Elgg has been designed, from the first line of code to the last, to be a flexible social network. It's not an organic evolution or a grass-roots development; it's architecture, and we're extremely proud of it.

At its heart is user control. Over the next few years, the explosion in niche social networks, and otherwise socially-enabled websites, will lead to new technologies that will allow you to federate your connections all over the Internet. This presents new opportunities for exciting new applications, but as I recently discussed with Demo.com, it also opens new opportunities for your data to be abused. Therefore, you need to control exactly what is released, and to whom. That's the core principle in Elgg.

We're very proud to have released Elgg 1.0, but this is only the beginning. Watch this space.