BuddyPress vs. Elgg: Which one to choose now?

If everybody wanted to build a social networking site and was completely satisfied with the way BuddyPress ships right now (while still in beta stage), there wouldn’t be any need for Elgg. In fact, there probably wouldn’t have been an Elgg 1.1 or 1.2. Yet for many semi-/demi- cut-n-paste web developers, er, designers the inevitable fact remains this: Elgg is stable. It’s stable enough to sustain a community of 20,000+ users without crashing. That, case in point, is why Elgg is the perfect short-term solution if you really, truly need a functioning social networking site that needs to be fully operational without any hiccups. If you’re solely looking for functionality and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about page layout, meaning that your prospective users in your community likely already know each other and don’t need the guidance of a well thought-out and organized design, Elgg is the perfect short-term solution. It’s simple and it’s got most everything you need already built in — messaging, file sharing, bloggin, photo albums, friend requests, activity feeds, an awesome contextual menu, etc. Here’s the catch… theming and development/support community. Unless you’re very well versed in PHP or only looking to install Elgg out of the box as is, so that you can continue making upgrades without adversely affecting your mods or any other adjustments you’ve made, you’re likely going to spend a lot of time code tweaking till your head plops off.

There’s a reason BuddyPress throws the one-two punch/uppercut/haduken at Elgg — it was built on WordPress (MU). Most developers I know did what their colleagues have done… they’ve actively kept up with the upgrades of WP and its plugins, turning it into a full-fledged CMS — now, they want to throw in social networking to put the icing on the cake. Elgg didn’t start out that way, so it’s *fan* base is much smaller. And while it is currently reliable and supports Open Data Definition, it lacks the simplicity of BuddyPress both in usability and flexibility.

WordPress is to ExpressionEngine as Elgg is to BuddyPress.  EE is great. Elgg is great. If you want to learn a set of whole new systems (EE’s tags & Elgg’s views), more power to you! But if you’re familiar with WP’s coding structure and can spare several months before you start unleashing the power of social networking to the masses, I would wait till BP is ready for primetime… because once it has reached that phase, there’s no doubt in my mind that it’ll zoom past by Elgg.

Score
Short term
Elgg: 1
BuddyPress: 0

Long term
Elgg: 0
BuddyPress: 1

BuddyPress vs. Elgg: Development/Support Community

As many of you out there have noticed, when it comes to (hosted) Social Networking communities, you really only have two-and-a-half solutions: 1) BuddyPress, 2) Elgg and 3) Boonex/Dolphin. Clearly, this blog is titled “BuddyPress vs. Elgg” with no mentioning of Dolphin even though it has been in development for some time. Here’s why: If you’re looking for a hosted social networking platform, you clearly want it to be a white label solution. Boonex will charge you to remove their linkbacks on the footer of your networking site. Total Damage: $40/year or $100 lifetime. That may not seem too shabby but Dolphin without its plugins Ray/Orca — I know, were they high when they named this software? — is useless. So you’ll have to scrape up more dough because those modifications to make it a true social networking system will cost you an additional $40 per plugin per year (or $100 per plugin for unlimited upgrades). All in all, you could end up spending $1,000 for this system the way it’s configured in the demo. Still, it’s a relatively reasonable price, depending how you look at it.

So why isn’t it among the Big Two of social networking start-up sites? Development Community. Even some of the plugin developers charge upwards of 30 bucks for their plugins, which aren’t very polished sometimes. Worst of all, there is an absolute lack in support for this system, because the core keeps changing, which leaves a lot of people stranded after upgrades (ie. read: broken themes/plugins). Unfortunately, things don’t get better when it comes to Elgg. Most of their support is dried up and Google searches point to some issues dating back as far as 2005. Most surprisingly is the fact that no *actual, dedicated Elgg forum* really exists yet. If you try to search for anything specific, you’ll be presented with a long list of related tags, not actual search engine results — you know, the kind you’re used to on Google/Yahoo/MSN. As a result, some Elgg people have started bbPress forums while others are talking to each other via Google Groups.

Enter: BuddyPress. When it comes to the development and support community, BP is virtually unrivaled. I see posts as fresh as several minutes old. This is, no doubt, largely due in part by it being built on top of the most popular open source blogging system on the Web. And while some of BP’s posts are still unanswered, the thirst for continuous improvement is there. It has a large *fan* base, which translates into more support and less coding errors. Not to mention, I have never seen anybody as involved as Andy has in the production process; I’ve seen him comment on user issues outside of buddypress.org — amazing. Technically, BuddyPress ought to score big in this round then, but I’ll hold off on this simply because if you’re a knowledge PHP programmer, Elgg is still a very reliable, solid system.

Score:
BuddyPress: 1
Elgg: 0

BuddyPress vs. Elgg: Plugins/Mods

Maybe it’s just my perception of things, but it seems to me that Elgg has more working versions of its so-called mods (plugins). There are two for inviting friends, one for video management, a friend “relationship” mod and several others to make it turn into more of a MySpace/Facebook type of deal. There are a few *relatively* active mod developers. You could actually install them all and you’d be ready to go. BUT what I suspect is that the BP community will catch up faster than to Elgg in this area, because I’d assume most of the existing plugins can be ported over from WP to BP — I could be dead wrong on this. As for now, Elgg has a leg up on BP… probably not for very long though.

Score:
BuddyPress: 0
Elgg: 1

BuddyPress vs. Elgg: (Top) Navigation

This is just a short write-up on the top, gray navigation you see in both BuddyPress and Elgg. What I disklike about both is that they span 100% in width, but that’s just a quick css edit. I like the idea of the mini-avatar in Elgg and a button to link back to the homepage, which is something that I believe was carried over to BP. What I’m not the biggest fan of are the dropdown menus. On Elgg, you have this really ugly carrot sprite pointing downward to signal that it’s a dropdown menu, even though you would’ve found that out simply by hovering over it — again, this is an easy css fix. What I disklike about the dropdown nav in BuddyPress is that it flickers a lot on the hover state. I have no idea why. BP’s random visit links are also a nice change of pace from Elgg, but that doesn’t mean it makes it any better. In general, I don’t think one is better than the other. BP is very similar to Elgg in that regard just a bit more advanced with a second tier of dropdown menus and the added random visit links. If there was an option to have the dreaded menu slide up/down by hovering near/away from it, it’d place more emphasis on the content and would make the member’s account look a bit cleaner, IMHO.

Score:
Draw

Update: Flickering seems to have disappeared now. Also noticed the rounded corners on the bottom of each dropdown… not too shabby.

BuddyPress vs. Elgg: Blogging

It’s hard to beat a blogging system when it’s the #1 open source blogging system in the entire universe. So it’s not much of surprise when I say that Elgg’s blogging platform doesn’t even come close to BP’s, because it’s built on WP. I wouldn’t call Elgg’s blogging system useless, though. Think of it as a means to an end: You want to write and publish your thoughts on the WWW and don’t care too much about categories, tags, mixed media or formatting… in that case, Elgg is your baby — for some people that’s just enough. If you want just more control over said thoughts, it’ll be very hard to beat BP. On the flipside, I have yet to find out how to get rid of the “Just another BuddyPress Testdrive webblog” under my blog listing on BP — I have deleted that blog entry and yet it’s still there.

Score:
BuddyPress: 1
Elgg: 0

BuddyPress vs. Elgg: Theming

Hands down, BuddyPress is much easier on the eyes than Elgg. There’s more activity on the homepage and whatever your WP site’s theme looks like, your BP installation will just look as pretty. Elgg, on the other hand, is the ugly duckling that just won’t grow up to be the graceful swan. The whole mods/views system it’s based on is a freakin nightmare. Most of the files that control the look are hooked up to one another, so if you’re changing the layout for the homepage, you’re changing the layout out for several other pages in the process. Now, is that good or bad? To me, it’s worse than bad. It’s just atrocious. And while Elgg’s css file gets pretty granular, it’s sooooo long that you’ll have to print it out and actually see what’s going on. Personally, I feel that BP has more control over this issue than Elgg will ever have. Also, if you’re on WP right now, you can port over your theme to BP… good luck doing that with Elgg. That said, if you don’t mind the sort of bland layout of Elgg (the default homepage isn’t too bad, but the profile pages are pretty heavy on empty space… and not in a minimalist sort of way), this probably won’t be a huge issue for you.

Score:
BuddyPress: 1
Elgg: 0

BuddyPress vs. Elgg: Avatars

Created a new account and uploaded a pic during the signup process. Once I got to the avatar section, the dashed cropping selection was somehow stuck in the upper left corner instead of the actual picture. Proceeded to drag marquee toward the picture, but it jumped right back upon release of the dragging. Pressed enter instead to make the selection disappear and got a funny cropped picture instead.

Next, I tried to edit my avatar by uploading a new pic (different file & filename), which gave me the nifty selection box on top of the picture — yes! Made the necessary adjustments to the marquee to make a specific selection on said new pic, pressed the crop and upload button and… nothing — no! Went through this process with varying steps twice and still to no avail. Cannot edit my avatar. Lovely.

Score
Elgg: 1
BuddyPress: 0

Tags | elgg vs buddgypress