Elgg is known for a social networking application, Drupal is known as a Content Management System and Wordpress is known for blogging. But with all these three applications you can develop a huge community based application.

Purpose of this comparative study was to find out a better application to develop a community based application. To do that, I considered few simple things as follows.

• How easy to create a plug-in/widget/module

• Number of available built-in plug-ins

• Documentation and

• Themes

and followings are the results that I have got after installing them, playing with them and studying on them..

Elgg:

Creating a plug-in : As usual, nothing too complicated.

Available plug-ins: There around 200 plug-ins found and most common plug-ins are there.

Documentation : They have good documentations on their core developments. But its not vastly described

Themes : There are only few themes found. This is bad side of these applications that it doesn’t have too many built-in themes.

Summary : A social networking application. Installation is very easy, same for widget and plug-in. mainly focused on social networking to connect friends and make a common place for all friends. It has got all plug-ins and widgets that required creating a social application. Problem is there are not too much options or built-in features and customizations will be required in most of the cases. Although creating plug-ins and widgets will not be a big deal. It has very good drag drop options and easy installations system. Community is not that big in fact! And main problem they got only few built-in themes!

Drupal:

Creating a plug-in : Ain’t that easy as they don’t inspire you to code. What we can do is…we can install the related module and we can customize it! Or creating a module will be a little bit complected.

Available plug-ins: A lot! Saw almost all needed features which they called MODULE.

Documentation : They have PDF version of the document. And its really cool.

Themes : There are sufficient Themes available in Drupal official site and in third party site but developing a Drupal will be a little be tricky. It has to go through some enabling/disabling stuff and it has to go through some API calls as well.

Summary : Mainly a CMS but they also call it CMF. So this Content management Framework supposed to allow to customize the code and make it on our own way. It has some problem on installations. Like php.ini has default memory limit 8M but Drupar required 16M. And they also have some other complication over installations. But, after all it can be a nice choice for community based application.

Wordpress:

Creating a plug-in : Not a big deal at all! In fact, this is one of the easiest among others.

Available plug-ins: Thousands by hundreds of developers!

Documentation : Wordpress got best documentations among all these names I mentioned.

Themes : Really easy!

Summary : Wordpress is popular for its huge community and the flexibility. Their documentation is simply awesome. Creating plug-ins and theme are easier than any other one I’m comparing here. It has got all the necessary plug-ins and widgets they any kind of community based application needs.

In My Humble Opinion : Wordpress is the winner