Administration

As an Elgg administrator, initially you will be spending most of your time here. This is the backbone of your entire site. If you are going to learn anything about Elgg, learn how to use this section very well. Now that that's out of the way, lets get started.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Site Administration 3 User Administration 4 Tool Administration 5 System Diagnostics

Overview

When you click Administration, you will be taken to the statistics page. My installation looks like this:

[1] This is not a standard installation, I have a few plug ins installed which add a menu entry here that I will not cover.

Let's look at what is on this page. You have your top bar at the very top. Then you have you left side bar with options I will explain in the next section. You have the statistics page in the middle which shows your Elgg version, number of users (active and inactive), as well as various statistics about the content of the site.

Site Administration

Most of this is set up during the install of Elgg. This is the most vital part of the initial set up. If you do it correctly, you should (almost) never have to touch this again.

[2]

Name of your site: This is the name you want to appear on your site. This is the name of your site.

Description of your site: This is optional. This is a description of your site.

Site email address: This is the address your messages generated by Elgg are going to be sent from.

The full path to your site root on your disk, followed by a trailing slash: This is the path to your data folder on your server. This is where data for the site is stored such as the user's avatars for their profile.

Do not put this in your website's root folder (usually /www/ or /public_html/). I used /home/USER/etc/data/ for mine. Yours will be different. Do not forget the slash (/) at the end of the path.

Enter the view which will be used as the default...: I just leave this to default.

The default language for your site: This is the default language for your site. You need to have a valid language pack installed for languages aside from English. At this point, no other language packs are complete.

The default access permissions: Default access permissions are the viewing permissions users get by default. When a user creates content, they select who can access it. Private, friends, logged in users, and Public are the available access levels.

Allow user default access: This allows users to override the default access permissions you set in the previous step.

Use simple cache: This allows caching of content that doesn't change (i.e. CSS and javascript files). This is recommended to make your site faster.

Use view filepath cache: This caches the paths to plugins to make your site faster.

Debut mode: This enables or disables debug mode. If something with your site is going wrong and you plan to debug it, enable this. This is not recommended to enable this unless you need to, because it will slow your site down significantly.

Enable HTTPS logins: This will make login information send via HTTPS. Do not enable this unless you have a valid HTTPS setup on your server because it will break logins for the site if you don't.

Enable the RESTful API: This enables programs to access certain site features remotely.

User Administration

[3]

The user administration page is vital, especially if your site has a lot of users. This page is fairly straightforward.

On the top, you have the "Create users..." button which is explained here. [4]

Under that you have the search bar for users. You can type in a partial name.

Under that, you have a listing of all the users.

Tool Administration

[5]

The tool administration is another essential part of the Elgg system. To add a tool, go into your site's directory on your server (typically via FTP), and copy the folder containing the tool to the /mod/ directory. Instructions are usually provided in the readme file when you download the tool.

The position in the list is not important. You can enable and disable the tools by pressing the corresponding button. The Disable All and Enable All buttons should not be used unless there is a valid reason for it. Some tools will come with a settings button or put their settings on the left sidebar.

System Diagnostics

Unit Tests can only be run in debug mode and tend to leave junk around your log files and in your database.