Elgg

Elgg is a social networking framework. It provides the necessary functionality to allow you to run your own social networking site, whether publicly (like Facebook) or internally on a networked intranet (like Microsoft Sharepoint).

Features
Elgg comes with advanced user management and administration, social networking, cross-site tagging, powerful access control lists, internationalisation support, multiple view support (eg cell phones, iPhone), an advanced templating engine, a widget framework and more. A full list is available here.

Open Source
Elgg is an open source product. Not all open source products are free to download, but Elgg is. That means, in its simplest form, Elgg costs nothing at all. This does not mean it’s public domain: Elgg is released under the GNU Public License v2, which means the source code is licensed to you. With any software, it’s always a good idea to read the license.

Why do we choose Elgg?
Because Elgg provides a very good basic infrastructure and a lot of default features Elgg is a great platform to build communities with. One of the big differences compared to traditional Content Management Systems is that Elgg is build from the ground up as a social network. This approach centralizes users and their relations instead of content.

Next to this fundamental difference Elgg also uses the latest techniques like PHP 7 and MySQL 5+. These techniques stand for stability, performance but also ease of use and extendability. Therefore Elgg can also be used for big communities.

Interesting Elgg sites