Keetup Development

Develop social networks is no easy task. In fact, I was convinced it was difficult. Without emargo there platforms and tools to do it more easily. This does not mean that developing a network is a nonsense. In fact, a user like me (halfway between a novice and an expert) would be hard to build one.

Elgg is a platform developed for social networking without complications, with modules of users, blog, wall, photos, labels and many other tasks that make the task very comfortable.

One of the things that surprised me when I met elgg is the facility that exists, once mounted the network to manage and use. There is also the elgg community where you can always find tools, plugins, tips and help that can solve problems quickly.

The warmth and the friendliness of the interface makes it, to my taste, superior to other platforms like BuddyPress or NING. If you're planning to build your own network and understanding to use social networks but you know nothing about to create them, then Elgg is an excellent option to consider, no matter how much you know about development, systems or platforms. No matter if you're halfway between a novice and an expert like me.

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As we develop the Elgg modules, usually happens we may have had a small complication in programming and this is going to produce a conflict error on Elgg, the famous "WSOD" (White Screen of Death).

Then we will see how these errors can be detected more easily.

Suppose we know in which module is the error, but we can not disable it because there is no way to access the administration panel. In this case we could access the database and manually disable it, but it is not a quick fix, here I leave a tip:

In this example, the error is in the file folder start.php on our blog.

This will cause something like this:

Since we know exactly which file or line is the error, but we know that it is in the blog module, and have access to a terminal, we can disable it as follows.

Just go to the mod folder of your installation of Elgg, "cd mod" and type "touch disabled"

Once this is done automatically all modules are disabled then we can go to our admin panel and disable the conflicting module, in this case blog:

Once the operation not forget to delete the file 'disabled' with 'rm disabled. "

And everything is working properly.

Extra tip:

Elgg automatically, we hide all bugs, but if we are under development and we see the errors, we can make it through. Htaccess that is in our Elgg, find the line that says:

php_value display_errors 0

And replace

php_value display_errors 1

That's all for now, I hope they have served, be happy programming: D

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In the next post, we'll see how to turn ordinary users to our platform Elgg administrator in order to succeed, we must enter the User Administrator menu, in our administration panel.

At this point, we have a list of users and a search engine, find the user you want to convert to admnistrdor, and click on it, we send the profile and see the following links in the user's choices.

After making clicks, we will confirm the action:

Once confirmed, we have finished converting an Elgg user an administrator, which may help to eliminate and / or edit anything registered on the network, whether elgg blog post, users, or groups.

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After having installed our social network based on Elgg, something very important is to have a statistic of site visits, and what better than to do with Google Analytics.

To perform this task very simple, we can install the plugin "Google Analytics", downloaded from the Elgg Community in the following url:

http://bit.ly/kETGJo

Then we unpack and add the folder / mod on our site.

To enable this we must go to Elgg admin panel:

In the Administration section of tools:

Now enable the plugin to add:

After we enable click settings, you can configure the plugin.

Now enter the code provided by google analytics in the "Google Analytics tracking ID." Our code should be: "UA-xxxxxx-x"

Press the Save button and you have our plugin configured and Google Analytics on our site Elgg.

To confirm that this working and have added the code to our site. Right click on the page, "view source of the page, to look for the word" UA-"we add new, and we should see the end of the web analytics code.

I hope that this post will be helpful and were able to successfully install this plugin.

Happy Coding!

Diego Gallardo

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Something that we know as Social Network Administrators in Elgg, is that there are some plugins that we turn to maintain properly functioning social network, one of them is logrotate, which comes standard with Elgg.

This plugin can be rotated log tables Elgg. Allow time to time they are created new tables and moving the old logs to these new tables. This is good because if we have a lot of activity on the site, before long this table will weigh a lot, and hurt us when backing up the database. The rotation time is configurable, so we go looking at how often we go spinning.

Elgg in logs all the information stored on our network activity. From creating new users, the content they generate, reviews, photos, groups, activities, until the activation of new plugins, etc. Later we show how we view this log of activity in Elgg.

Now we will show how to configure this plugin. Recall that we access the Social Network as administrators.

1. Go to the administration section:

2. Then administration of tools:

3. We look for the plugin logrotate and empowering:

4. Once we enabled the plugin settings and click on there you can configure the frequency of rotation of the logs in the database.

5. A rotation capture logs of the database shows the main table elgg_system_log logs and the tables were already rotating elgg_system_log_ *. The suffix of the log table is the time when the rotation was conducted.

6. Now to see these logs from the Social Network from the same admin panel, we log browser.

7. And there we see the system logs.

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