Overview

The Social Connect plugin allows your Elgg users to connect to your website through practically all known external social networks. With Social Connect users can easily register for a new account on your Elgg website using Facebook, Google+, MySpace, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Windows Live, and many more. But also the Social Connect plugin simplifies the login process of existing users, that can now access your Elgg installation via all of the supported networks.

If you are an Elgg developer, Social Connect gives you as much control as you need by triggering hooks and raising events as users are registered, connected or logged into the system. In the plugin settings you can specify the desired default response to the social_connect,user hook, at a global or per-provider level:

• Always: social connection is always allowed
• Never: social connection is never allowed (use this only if you have a plugin that could change the response)
• Once per email: the email address is checked against the Elgg user database and if it already exists the corresponding user is connected
• Only with email: same as Once per email, but if an email address is not provided by the social network (for example, Twitter) then social connection will fail.

Social Connect uses HybridAuth as the connection engine and was loosely inspired by the elgg_social_login plugin.

It currently supports the following social networks (known as "providers" in the plugin):

• OpenID
• Google
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• Windows Live
• LinkedIn
• Foursquare
• AOL

But even more social networks can be added with the additional providers offered by HybridAuth (a complete list is at http://hybridauth.sourceforge.net/userguide.html). The underlying HybridAuth engine is always kept up-to-date, so as to give you the best and most reliable authentication engine.

More Info

See also

• Issue Tracking for the Social Connect plugin