Why you should consider Elgg

Recently with new technologies such as Node, React, and Flutter have built up a lot of hype in the developers community and outside it as well. Other technologies have been left behind because they are no longer “cool”. One of them is elgg. Why am I talking about elgg?  Should small-to-medium businesses consider using elgg for their applications or projects? Let’s take a look.

What is elgg? First off, let’s take a look at the official description of the framework:

 Elgg is an award-winning open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework with the core components needed to build a socially aware web application. 

Here are some key elements from that description:

 “robust framework” : elgg is a modular OOP framework that is driven by DI services, but unlike other alternatives, it features Symfony components, and uses RequireJS to manage and assemble different Javascript files from different modules.

 “socially aware web application” : You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, elgg comes with all the elements required for user interaction and user authentication. Thanks to that, you can focus your resources in actually building the features you need for your application.

Elgg isn't only focused on providing social networking elements, it’s focused more on being a better way of building a web application. Other frameworks like WordPress and Joomla, have some inherent security and design issues, a lot of which developers will not have workarounds to solve those issues. 

But still, why should you consider Elgg for your next web application?

It gets things done. It might surprise what an almost forgotten social networking framework can do nowadays. Elgg is not "cool"or "shiny". It has been written in PHP, which has a bad connotation by the majority of "hipster" developers. However, it lets you create robust web apps really fast. 

Around five months ago I was asked to provide a multimedia publishing platform, able to handle video playback and photo galleries. In a matter of a week I had a fully functional multimedia publishing platform, scalable and able to handle multiple visitors at the same time. Later on I was asked to extend the same platform except this time will be only for pictures. I successfully integrated TailWind CSS and implemented a beautiful and modern design in elgg. Essentially what I needed was install and activate only five plugins and one theme (the theme was custom made by me). That's it just five plugins, no useless dependencies (I'm looking at you is-left package), not even 200 dependencies, just that. And the best thing is that if I'm not available to make changes, you can easily find someone who knows PHP that can keep giving support to both platforms (this is very important, specially for small-to-medium size companies)

Next time you get a request for a web application, consider elgg. You will surprise your boss when you show up with a fully functional demo app in less than a week!

Happy Coding!