Forty Themes and a Framework: My Elgg Years

Most people who hire me today know me for WordPress and Laravel sites. Before that, I spent years in a smaller corner of the web: Elgg.

Elgg is open source software for building social networks. You install it on your own server, and you get profiles, groups, messages and a news feed. Around 2008 I started building on it, and it became my first real software business.

A theme store

From about 2009 to 2014 I ran ElggDesign, a store for Elgg themes. Over those years I designed and sold more than forty of them. They had names like Aqua, Breezy, Chromatic, Graphite and Integrity, and they came in tiers, from free entry themes to premium ones.

The free themes did an important job. They let people try my work before they paid for anything. I still work that way. Today I often build a working version of a client's site before they hire me, so they can see what they will get.

My own framework

Around 2015 I took the next step and built my own framework, SocialApparatus. The tagline was "Software for building communities." It was a PHP and MySQL system for social sites, built on Bootstrap so it worked on phones from the first day.

Building a framework teaches you things that building one site does not. You think about the person who installs it, the person who extends it, and the person who has to update it in five years.

The plugins that are still out there

Two of my Elgg plugins are still listed on elgg.org. Twitter Bootstrap 4.1 for Elgg has 2,817 downloads. The SocialApparatus Forums plugin has 686. Together that is more than 3,500 installs of my code on other people's servers.

What carried over

The common thread from those years to now is simple. I like to build software that people run for real, on their own servers, for their own members and customers. Themes became a framework, the framework became client sites, and client sites became the work I do today.

If you have a community site, a member portal or a social feature to build, that is still home ground for me. You can see current work and start a project on sbarron.com.