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I was looking at the available plugins that the award winning open source social networking platform-elgg offers to its dynamic user base. We have about 1000 elgg plugins released under the GPL license, under which elgg is released. Many of these plugins attracted my attention and I thought of putting down a note about my favorite elgg plugins that gears the growth of elgg as a popular and dependable social networking platform.
1. Tidypics Photo Gallery Plugin
Tidypics is one of the most popular and used plugin available in the community. This plugin adds the functionality of a photo album into your elgg site. Tidypics plugin helps you to create your own photo albums and upload photos into your albums. Users can tag those photos, comment on them and even add a provision to download those photos.

2. Elgg Social Commerce Plugin
Elgg Social Commerce plugin by elgg.in another popular elgg plugin. This is really a value added plugin into your elgg install. Social Commerce plugin adds an e-commerce store into your elgg install. This plugin is good and powerful but it has an advanced version which is released under commercial license. You can get the commercial version at http://socialcommerce.in. This plugin allow members to create their own online store. Members are allowed to buy and sell products, both physical and downloadable products online. Buyers can pay via paypal or other payment methods. Site admin can charge a percentage of the sales as commission. In summary, this plugin adds the many features of a good e-commerce system into your elgg install and adds a revenue model into it.

3. Profile Manager
This plugin provides a better use of profile fields, and configurable group fields. It has a lot of useful features and some of them are,
- search based on profile fields
- importing default or custom fields
- ordering of custom fields (drag and drop)
- add profile types
- add categories (draggable reordering, drop fields on categories to add)
- adds pulldown, radio, multiselect, calendar and datepicker field types
- show on register form (profile fields only)
- show output as tags
- mandatory fields (for register form, profile fields only)
- mandatory profile icon on register form
- disallow editing of a specific field (applies to edit profile only)
- replace profile fields access control with just one profile access option
- backup / restore profile fields configuration
- export user profile (meta)data to csv

The above are a list of few elgg plugins that attracted me mostly. I will add more plugins as I notice them.

Elgg is the best open source platform for creating social applications. Elgg can be used to develop social aware applications like e-Learning systems, social and family networks, intranet systems, closed communities etc. But, elgg was lacking one of the great features of this decade, the ecommerce factor.

The first few years of elgg lived with out the e-commerce or lets say social commerce features until when an Indian Company called Cubet Technologies came out with a new & feature rich elgg plugin called “Elgg Social Commerce Plugin“. This plugin is very feature rich and configurable, but its not FREE.  As per their website, it costs $249, but it looks worth.

For thos who look for a cheap solution, they have released a FREE version at the elgg’s plugin list at http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/webcubes/read/232027/elgg-social-commerce-plugin

The people beghind this cool plugin have developed many other elgg plugins and are focusing on elgg.