Elgg 1.8 social networking

Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 Social Networking and Elgg

Social features

Profiles

Relationships

Content sharing

Activity and notifications

Groups

Communication

What is Elgg?

The Elgg engine

User management

Privacy controls

Theming

Commenting

Tagging

Widgets

Internationalization

Feeds

Web services

The power of plugins

Bundled plugins

Third-party plugins

Themes

Building your own plugins

Case studies

Niche social network

Designing and building the site

Deploying the site

Plugins mentioned

Corporate intranet

Designing and building the site

Deploying the site

Plugins mentioned

Educational collaboration

Designing and building the site

Deploying the site

Plugins mentioned

Elgg resources

Elgg community

Elgg wiki

Developer resources

A few words of advice

Take notes

Save resources

Be methodical

Finding help

Summary

ch. 2 Installing Elgg

Note continued: Preparing the server

Checking requirements

Downloading the latest version

Extracting the files

Moving files to your web server directory

Configuring the server

Create the database

Run Elgg's installer

Loading the database

Configure Elgg

Creating the admin account

All done!

Summary

ch. 3 A Tour of Your First Elgg Site

Getting around

Registering users

User profiles and avatars

Profile information

Avatar

Profile widgets

Friends

Activity stream

Tools

Blogs

Bookmarks

Files

Groups

Pages

Messages

The wire

User settings

Your settings

Tools

Notifications

Administration

Activating plugins

Site categories

Custom profile fields

Default widgets

Site pages

Reported content

Customizing your site

User registration and authentication

Widgets

Friendship model

Roles

Help and support

Summary

ch. 4 Sharing Content

Blogs

Note continued: Creating a blog post

Embedding photos and files

Publishing

Finding and viewing

Search

Lists of blog posts

RSS feeds

Widget

Commenting

Use cases

Customizations

Bookmarks

Adding a bookmark

Bookmarklet

Viewing

Use cases

File

Uploading a file

Viewing

Use cases

Customizations

The wire

Posting

Viewing

Twitter integration

Use cases

Customizations

Summary

ch. 5 Communities, Collaboration, and Conversation

Groups

Creating a group

Group profile

Membership

Discussion forum

Group tools

Finding groups

Use cases

Customizations

Pages

Creating pages

Viewing

Use cases

Customizations

Messages

Inbox

Composing

Customizations

Message board

Customizations

Summary

ch. 6 Finding and Using Plugins

Plugin administration

Filtering and sorting

Plugin dependencies

Plugin settings

Finding plugins

Note continued: Browsing the repository

Searching

Evaluating before downloading

Look at the plugin overview

Read the comments

Check the history

Custom plugins

Installing plugins

Test server

Copying the code

Activating and configuring

Invalid plugin?

Troubleshooting

Themes

Finding and installing themes

Free themes

Commercial themes

Custom themes

Installing themes

Major community plugins

Tidypics

Plugin profile

Administration

Uploading photos

Viewing photos

Tagging photos

Event calendar

Plugin profile

Administration

Site calendar

Group calendar

Profile Manager

Plugin profile

Adding profile fields

Configuring the profile fields

Plugin settings

Summary

ch. 7 Creating Your First Plugin

What you need to know

Elgg developer resources

Setting up your development environment

Editing code

Configuring your site

Hello, World!

Plugin skeleton

Note continued: Create your plugin directory

Plugin manifest

Start script

Activating the hello world plugin

Register for the init, system event

Adding a new route

Creating a web page

Update routing

Add to the site menu

Extending the page handler

Add a sidebar menu

Language support

Personalizing the content

Organizing your content into views

A greeting view

A stats view

Review

Debugging

Debugging to the log

Debugging to the screen

Debugging PHP through an IDE

Firebug and other browser development tools

Elgg developer tools

Inspect

Theming sandbox

Summary

ch. 8 Customization through Plugins

Lesson 1 Changing wording

Problem

Solution

Example

Step 1 Create the plugin structure

Step 2 Find the language strings

Step 3 Override the language string

Exercise

Lesson 2 Modifying a section of a page

Problem

Solution

Example

Step 1 Find the view to override

Note continued: Step 2 Create the plugin structure

Step 3 Edit the logo view

Step 4 Style the header

Exercise

Lesson 3 Adding new content to a page

Problem

Solution

Example

Step 1 Find the view to extend

Step 2 Create the plugin structure

Step 3 Build our view

Step 4 Make the tips random

Exercise

Lesson 4 Doing something when X happens

Problem

Solution

Example

Step 1 Find the event

Step 2 Create the plugin structure

Step 3 Write the function that sends the e-mail

Exercise

Lesson 5 Creating a custom widget

Problem

Solution

Example

Step 1 Create the plugin structure

Step 2 Create the widget edit view

Step 3 Create the widget content view

Exercise

Lesson 6 Giving your users options

Problem

Solution

Example

Step 1 Create the plugin structure

Step 2 Add user settings

Step 3 Create the toolbar view

Step 4 Add CSS

Exercise

Lesson 7 Adding JavaScript

Problem

Note continued: Solution

Example

Step 1 Create the plugin structure

Step 2 Load the JavaScript file

Step 3 Add CSS and JavaScript initialization

Exercise

Lesson 8 Changing how Elgg does X

Problem

Solution

Example

Step 1 Create the plugin structure

Step 2 Create the index page

Step 3 Define the views

Step 4 Add the CSS

Step 5 Add a plugin setting

Exercise

Lesson 9 Collecting and storing data

Problem

Solution

Example

Overview

Step 1 Create the plugin structure

Step 2 Create the main help page

Step 3 Create the categories

Step 4 Add an administration page

Step 5 Create the form body

Step 6 Create the save action

Step 7 Create the help category page

Step 8 Create the help object view

Step 9 Add the help sidebar

Step 10 Add CSS for the topic listing page

Step 11 Finish the main help page

Exercise

Summary

ch. 9 Theming Elgg

What you need to know

Theming basics

Note continued: Elgg's default theme

HTML

CSS

JavaScript

Graphics

Views system

What is a view?

Extending a view

Overriding a view

Template language

Caching

The viewtype

Tools

CSS framework

Creating abstractions of common visual patterns

Customizing objects through extension classes

Adding external JavaScript and CSS

Menu system

Registering a menu item

Rendering a menu

Comparing theming in WordPress to Elgg

Building a theme

Plugin structure

Layout

Default layout

Page header

Page body layout

Page footer

Moving the search box

Styling the sidebar module

Moving the site menu to the topbar

Creating a mobile theme

Plugin structure

Layout

CSS

Summary

ch. 10 Moving to Production

Selecting a server

Performance considerations

Competing for resources

Usage patterns

General guidelines for server selection

Hosting options

Shared hosting

Note continued: Virtual Private Server

Dedicated server

Cloud hosting

Hosting company selection

Configuring a server

Apache

PHP

MySQL

Cron

E-mail

Managing the site

Backup

Code

Database

Files

Server configuration

Restoring

Log rotation

Spam

Registration

Detecting spammers

Web analytics

Daily tasks

Monitoring user registration

Reviewing reported content

Responding to feedback

Community management

Testing, upgrading, and moving a site

Testing

Mirroring the production site

Test plan

Upgrading

Moving a site

Performance

Benchmarking

Monitoring and data collection

Stress testing

Easy performance gains

Advanced performance tuning and scaling

Caching

Multiple servers

Resources

Reporting bugs

Steps to reproduce the problem

Elgg or plugin?

Reporting the bug

Summary

Appendix A Developer's Quick Start Guide

Overview of Elgg as a framework

Note continued: What is Elgg?

Object-oriented or procedural?

Does it use the Model-View-Controller pattern?

Convention or configuration?

Is it extensible?

What template engine is used?

A Model-View-Controller perspective of Elgg

Overview

Controllers

Model

Views

Routing

Code location

Actions

Code location

Page handlers

Code location

Framework booting

Code location

Data model

Entities

Type and subtype

GUID

Owner

Container

Access

Database

Relationships

Extenders

Database

Retrieval functions

Code location

Views

View templates

Page shells and layout

View type

Overriding and extending views

Special views

Code location

Events and hooks

Elgg events

Plugin hooks

Code location

Plugins

Initialization

Plugin order

Conventions

Themes

Code location

Activity stream

Code location

Notifications

Code location

Note continued: Internationalization and localization

Code location

Lightning round

Authentication

Caching

Configuration

Debugging and logging

JavaScript

Menus

Private settings

Search

Security

Session handling

Unit tests

Web services

Widgets

Summary

Appendix B Views Catalog

Using views

Page structure

Shells

Layouts

Elements

Topbar

Header

Sidebar

Footer

Owner block

Status messages

Comments

Search box

Components

Gallery

Image block

List

Module

Navigation

Breadcrumbs

Pagination

Menus

Topbar menu

Site menu

Page menu

Footer menu

User hover menu

Entity menu

Tabs

Forms

Input

Access

Buttons

Checkboxes

Date

Drop-down selector

File upload

Hidden input

Large textarea

Password

Radio buttons

Textbox

User pickers

Output

Date

E-mail address

Link

Tag cloud

Tags

Text

The form

Note continued: Users, groups, and objects

Activity stream

Likes

Like this

List users

Widgets

Administration

Summary.