Elgg is a new breed of social software based around choice, flexibility and openness: a system that firmly places individuals at the center of their activities. With the freedom to incorporate all of your favorite tools within one environment, Elgg allows you to showcase your content with as many or as few people as you choose.

Elgg is an open source software platform designed to allow people to easily connect and share resources. Elgg allows you to create a social network and host it on your own infrastructure, modifying the features to fit your specific needs. Users establish personal digital identities and connect with other people, collaborate with them and discover new resources through their connections. Plugins allow users on different social networks to collaborate, and provide specific functionality for tasks like project management, mobile browsing and collaboration through user-controlled wikis.

Features of Elgg:

• Weblog: Elgg comes with a personal and friends weblogging system. This weblog is a central piece and can link to items in the repository. Each weblog post can be shared with who ever the learner wants.
• Social networking: Elgg is all about the creation of a learning landscape therefore it is necessary to link to, and find, others with similar interests. Elgg uses social networking as a means of finding and sharing knowledge with others.
• File repository: Elgg has a file repository which can be used to house many different file types.
• Access control: This is one of the strongest features in Elgg, a powerful access system allows fine-grained privacy to all aspects of an individuals Elgg.
• Tagging: This is now a popular way to search and find other objects and people of similar interest.
• Customisation: Elgg comes with some standard templates, however, users can customise their own landscape. This is done through the templating system.
• XML-RPC: use external blogging clients to post to an Elgg site.
• Community building: using the communities function learners can create their own communities around shared interests. This is also proving popular for research collaboration.
• Wiki: Integration with MediaWiki
• Profile data: link to other learners and resources through your profile data.
• Syndication: RSS - there are RSS feeds for learners, weblogs, communities, tags, files and FOAF.
• Podcasting: Elgg is an extremely effective podcasting platform.

You can download Elgg by clicking HERE!

Skeletonz is a new content management system (CMS) based on Python. It differs from others by being simple, but yet very powerful and extensible. If you need a simple system that you and your users are going love then Skeletonz might be the solution you are looking for. Its features are:

You can check out its demo HERE! Skeletonz current version number is 1.0 beta. To see how to install Skeletonz , please check out the install guide.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.

Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 100,000 registered users on this site alone, speaking over 70 languages in over 150 countries. The best place to start is Using Moodle, which is where the main international discussions are held in English, but it has a variety of groups discussing other topics and in other languages.

Check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz. Moodle is available in a variety of download packages with different levels of stability, as well as via CVS from Sourceforge.net. A number of additional modules/plugins and language packs are also available.

TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is far superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks.

TaskJuggler is an Open Source tools for serious project managers. It covers the complete spectrum of project management tasks from the first idea to the completion of the project. It assists you during project scoping, resource assignment, cost and revenue planing, risk and communication management.

TaskJuggler provides an optimizing scheduler that computes your project time lines and resource assignments based on the project outline and the constrains that you have provided. The build-in resource balancer and consistency checker offload you from having to worry about irrelevant details and ring the alarm if the project gets out of hand. Its flexible “as many details as necessary”-approach allows you to still plan your project as you go, making it also ideal for new management strategies such as Extreme Programming and Agile Project Management.

You can download TaskJuggler HERE!

MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts – hence Ajax CMS. It empowers its users to build engaging “Web 2.0″ sites today, with its pre-integrated Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. If you’re a CSS designer or Ajax aficionado, this is the CMS for you; and if you like what you see today, you’ll love what’s coming.

Techies call MODx a Content Management Framework (”CMF“): equal parts custom web app builder and Content Management System (”CMS“). With a flexible API and a robust event override system, MODx makes building engaging web projects straightforward — or changing core functionality without hacking the core code possible. Custom tweaks won’t leave you pulling out your hair when it’s time to upgrade.

Not only does MODx help you build sites quickly, but it also is both robust and simple. As far as end-users know, MODx is just an easy-to-use online application; for developers there’s freely available resources and a fantastic end-user community.

On the business and technical end of things, MODx is licensed as a GPL project, which translates into free for anyone to use. It’s built in PHP, uses a MySQL database backend and runs on pretty much any version of either released in the last few years. For web servers, it’ll work with either Apache or IIS. Its Control Panel, or Manager if you prefer, runs on pretty much any modern browser, including Safari. It also allows you to quickly leverage the latest rage of AJAX/Web 2.0 technologies. If you want to learn more, just peek at the features.

SWiK is a community driven resource for open source software. Try starting a page about your favorite project, syndicating a blog for a topic, or browsing through tags people have added to projects or pages.

SWiK contains information and news about thousands of open source projects and people are constantly adding cool new stuff.

SWiK is a project to help people collaboratively document open-source software. (now hiring!)

To do this, you can create template-able SWiK wiki pages: they can act like blogs, or like lists of bookmarks, although by default they are just a simple page you can edit whichever way you want.

SWiK is a community project with information added by people like you, anyone can edit SWiK’s wiki pages.

SWiK uses Ajax to make editing easier and faster; try playing around with the editing capabilities in sandbox. Or register and you can try making wiki pages on your own page (click on your name in the upper right)

WebGUI (pronounced web-gooey) is one of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS) available today. It is downloaded over 5,000 times per month and is in use as an Intranet application framework in several Fortune 500 firms in the United States.WebGUI is a content management platform built to allow average business users to build and maintain complex web sites. It is modular, pluggable, and platform independent. It was designed to allow the people who create the content to manage it online, rather than content management taking up the time of the busy IT Staff.

In summary, WebGUI is both a content management system and an application framework. It is used every day by many organizations who wish to spend more time running their businesses than managing their web sites, intranets, or extranets.

ActiveCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools. 100% free!

Highlights

1. Easy to install and easy to use
2. Web-based. After installation only thing you’ll need to use it is web browser
3. 100% open source, 100% free
4. No limitations on number of projects, clients, team members…
5. Per project permissions

ActiveCollab is still under heavy development, but you can download the first alpha release and give it a test run. Take a look at the installation guide to get started. You can download it HERE (Zip File) or HERE(tar.gz File)!