1. What considerations have you gone through to decide between web host or self host?
2. What concerns do you have about personal security/confidentiality?

I know these are things I should bring up in elgg forum, but hey, post often, post many and responses may come.

I’m looking to do the opposite and migrate from elgg to drupal. Any one have any experience with this?

I haven’t yet done a Drupal to Elgg migration, but I just took a look at the table structure of Elgg, and (famous last words here) it might not be that hard.

In the migration, the ident fielg in Elgg’s “users” table corresponds to the uid in Drupal’s “users” table, and migrating the basic user data would be pretty straighforward.

Then, the values in Drupal’s “node” table would be mapped to Elgg’s “weblog_posts” table; comments would be moved from Drupal’s “comment” table to Elgg’s “weblog_comment” table.

Drupal’s taxonomy would be recreated on Elgg’s “tags” table —

It looks like weblogs.ucalgary.ca is using Drupal’s Organic Groups module. The groups could be re-created within Elgg’s “groups” and “group_membership” tables.

Obviously, there would be a whole lot of tweaking, but at first glance it seems like a manageable job — it looks like you have under 400 posts at weblogs.ucalgary.edu, which would make it even more manageable.

RE

Also, it’s not that Drupal isn’t working out, it’s just that weblogs.ucalgary.ca doesn’t have the right feel – it’s not a personal environment, it’s a commune.

Zack Rosen had a post on his blog where he was advocating combining Drupal and Elgg — you are right on when you identify that Drupal is not a personal environment. Drupal and Elgg are both great projects, but they do things with a different emphasis.

RE

It looks like weblogs.ucalgary.ca is using Drupal’s Organic Groups module. The groups could be re-created within Elgg’s “groups” and “group_membership” tables.

Depending on whether you wanted Drupal’s OG’s to become Elgg communities or access groups, you would use either Elgg’s Elgg’s “groups” and “group_membership” tables (for access groups) or Elgg’s “users” table (for communities) — either way, though, it’s just a field mapping issue.

I just found some code that adds LDAP authentication to Elgg, so that will help:
http://elgg.net/elggcoding/weblog/3049.html

Now to figure out how to map users between the 2 systems, and migrate Drupal nodes to Elgg tables…

Jim Klein has also constructed some LDAP code for his installation, this might be useful.

Code: http://elgg.net/elggcoding/files/1036

His site: http://webapps.saugus.k12.ca.us/community

We are keen to look at how Elgg can integrate with other software – no point replicating functionality – we would be interested in listening to any advice you may have on this, especially relating to Drupal.

Cheers.

As much as I’d love to turf the hosting side, many users on campus will still want a provided solution (at least for now) so I kind of need to make sure a decent on-campus hosting option is available even as I evangelize about the powers of having your own personal off-site hosting.

Eduglu etc… should be able to adapt to use whatever people are publishing, wherever they do it, so it won’t care if it’s an on- or off-campus host…

I haven’t done a migration. So I can’t help there. But I have had WPMU up and running for almost five months. I like it. I looked at ELGG before setting up WPMU and just didn’t like the feel. I did like that users could customize their theme, this is a short coming of WPMU. I guess I’m just offering to be a resource for WPMU.

One thing that is troubling is the table structure in WPMU. Each user gets 9 tables in the DB. The developers have WordPress.com set up to run on a INNODB and a cluster, I think. But there is a fairly substantial difference between the WordPress.com code and WPMU code.