I just discovered elgg, when I was trying to figure out how to make organic groups work properly. Elgg has many terrific features of the type show-this-post-only-to-my-friends built-in, that work pretty much at the click of a button. It seems far easier to use than organic groups, both in terms of admin and user interface, and without a lot of the node-access errors that keep showing up on my site. What I'm reading today suggests that a lot of people think elgg and moodle together would do perhaps 90% of what I'm trying to do with Drupal (not the ecommerce portion). Moodle is distance education software. elgg is used for the social networking. I'd be very interested to find out what people think of elgg or moodle. (elgg.org, elgg.net, moodle.org).
By kae on
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some discussions
if you google on drupal and elgg you'll also find some interesting discussion about integrating drupal and elgg
here is one fan of elgg/moodle
http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000725.html
this blog is pretty interesting
other software
I'd also be interested in evaluations of similar software, such as sakai.
sakai
http://www.sakaitestdrive.com/
Sakai is more for institutional needs
and less for smaller users. Some of the features of Sakai were designed to allow for easier integration with some of the other larger apps used to manage info at universities. The server setup required to run Sakai is also more complex than what is required to run Drupal, Moodle, or Elgg.
Zack Rosen has a good blog post about it here.
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Tools for Teachers
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drupal vs moodle
I'm test driving moodle on opensourcecms.com.
Here are some nice admin variables moodle has that drupal doesn't have. It has a better set of security variables it seems.
1)notimenosee. unsubscribe after inactivity
2)deleteunconfirmed.
3)sessiontimeout
4) five variables to make log in more secure (eg prevent bruteforce password attempts)
5) sitepolicy that users must agree to
it does have allowemailaddress (but will reject all others)
it only has 15 modules versus 350 in drupal 4.6 (although a lot of the variables would become modules in Drupal, and the modules do not duplicate each other)
the list of courses seem to allow a nice structure for a hierarchical tree, but the demo crashed when I was trying it
Use Drupal and Moodle together
they will co-habitate rather nicely, there is even a single sign on integration written. Moodle will give you your structured learning environment, drupal will basically glue your community together.
http://www.drupaled.org/drupal_moodle_single_sign_on_integration_available
Compared to Drupal Ellg is rather minimal, but it does already have the core feature set you would want in your academic setting. Your challenge with Drupal would be mostly a configuration one.
GoJoingGo
I don't know anything about elgg. Sounds interesting. Is it easy to install? Php mysql? If you are looking for social networking take a look at the GojoinGo module (http://drupal.org/node/44047) which offers a complete suite of soical networking features.
Elgg is pretty simple to install
I'd say it's about the same as a Drupal install.
Cheers,
Bill
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Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
gojoingo
php mysql.
gojoingo doesn't look like it has the mygroups function, looking at the feature list, and show this post only to my close friends functions. are you running it? can i look at your site?
It depends on your specific needs
There are some small differences (and, arguably, some big differences) between Drupal and Elgg.
Elgg offers file uploads for each individual user. These uploads can be tagged (comparable to freetagging in 4.7) and these tags generate rss feeds. These file uploads can be subscribed to via rss; using this method, individual users can set up topic-specific podcasts out of the box. Using Elgg's access controls, individual users can create feeds (and blog posts) accessible to anonymous users, site members, or individual members within the site.
Elgg also allows individual users to have their own collection of rss feeds.
Basically, Elgg offers users pretty granular control over what happens to their content (blog posts, file uploads, rss feeds). All content can be categorized/organized via freetagging.
On the other hand, Drupal allows you to create many more types of sites, and to organize site content in a greater variety of ways. Drupal also allows users/site admins to create more effective navigational menus to provide users with more intuitive ways to access content.
There are other differences, but, after a certain point, simply describing these differences gets away from the essential point of your question.
Elgg, Drupal, and Moodle are all great solutions. The *best* solution for your project will be driven by the needs of what you are trying to accomplish.
If you are trying to set up distance learning for a large number of courses, Moodle would be a good app to explore. Alternately, you could look at a cluster of Drupal sites running off one codebase.
If you want to set up a community/social networking piece to your project, then either Elgg or Drupal could fit. In general terms, a Drupal based community will allow you more centralized control over your site and, by extension, your users -- this centralized control comes via the role based access controls, and via the ability to choose what users post what content into what areas. I need to stress, however, that greater control over user behavior is a design choice, and it's just as easy not to create it if that's what you want.
Elgg provides a more level playing field. The access control over what users can do is less granular, while individual users have more granular control over each specific piece of content.
I hope this was helpful.
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
alphabetical list
bill et al,
bill, thanks for the details.
1 question for everyone: is there a module in drupal that enables to create a hierarchical list that's alphabetical? I've actually never seen an alphabetical list on a drupal site, so I'm thinking maybe it's not there.
believe it or not, I'm thinking about using moodle to track the groups (say hundreds or thousands of them) being created in alphabetical order, and then linking to the node on drupal that corresponds. moodle automatically creates a list of categories (in their cases courses) which is in alphabetical order (and allows children).
i've had to not use the various taxonomy modules usually recommended (context, access, simpleaccess) because i want to use organic groups. i don't even think the new views module does this although i haven't spent very long with it.
e.g. if i make 4 courses in moodle, it will automatically put them in this order on a table of contents.
books
music
--classical music
-----beethoven
is there any module i can use in drupal?
any module that doesn't conflict with og?
In Drupal, taxonomy terms
In Drupal, taxonomy terms are sorted first by weight, then alphabetically -- so, all terms within the same weight are put into alphabetical order.
RE using Moodle to track groups, I'd have to say you'd be better off using Elgg's communities than Moodle for this purpose -- it'd be easier to modify Elgg to give you the interface you want rather than use Moodle as a workaround -- also, Elgg is focusing attention on improving the UI right now, and chances are good that improved navigation of existing communities is in the works.
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
tax
bonobo,
thank you. yes the weighting issues gets in the way since they also order the blocks. and i may want blocks in a different order than my table of contents. what are you using to order? taxonomy menu?
elgg
i've just tried out an elgg configuration. It appears that I have one admin and cannot make any more! doesn't seem to have much that can be done by admin. On admin screen it seems that admin can only
1) add user. change their password, email addr, private setting
2) remove objectionable content
3) block objectionable words
I'd recommend grabbing the Elgg version
from the svn repository -- the inability to add additional admin users is a bug that exists in the version you can download in the version from EduForge -- in the version in svn, the bug is fixed.
WRT admin rights, currently the admin has limited rights above other users -- by design, Elgg is not particularly hierarchical -- it was designed to give individual users a fair amount of control over their personal space. There is some talk of building a module that would allow for additional admin control (this will be pretty key in using Elgg in most k-12 settings). Also, another thing to check out is the integration b/w Elgg and Moodle -- this involves some pretty substantial changes to the codebase that should mark a new phase in Elgg development.
Also, if you're interested, I just finished a blog post about Elgg, Moodle, and Drupal in academic settings.
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
common log-in
bonobo,
thank you for alerting me to the bug.
i read your blog. very interesting. is this what you are running? do you have common log-in? what degree of integration are you running?
Currently, we are working out
the best way to go about this -- there are methods of sharing content between sites (aggregator2, node_import, publish/subscribe, etc) but none of them are simple enough -- IMO -- to scale upwards and run cleanly on many sites.
Elgg has some nice aggregator features built in -- you can import and tag rss feeds directly into your own blog. However, I want users to be able to pick and choose individual nodes/posts, and import these cleanly between sites --
So, while there are some solutions in place that allow for most of what I'm talking about, they are not particularly accessible to the average user.
Some of what FunnyMonkey is currently working on doing can be broken down into two distinct categories:
1. Improving existing methods of distributing info between sites; and
2. Selecting, developing, and documenting a scalable, secure SSO solution.
To make a long answer even longer: The ability to share content exists, but it's not as clean/granular as it needs to be. Single Sign On exists between Moodle and Elgg, but not between Drupal and Elgg (although it does exist between Drupal and Moodle).
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
pls post back
thank you. I'd be interested to hear what you find and decide upon. Please keep us updated! thank you.