Eighteen years of shipping community software

In 2008 I started making Elgg themes. Elgg was PHP's answer to the social network question, long before Mastodon, before ActivityPub, back when "social network" still meant Myspace and a just-IPO'd Facebook. I built ElggDesign — a PrestaShop storefront selling Elgg themes organized into Premium, Middle, Economy, and Entry tiers. Over the next six years I shipped more than forty themes under that brand.

In 2015 I went a level deeper and built SocialApparatus, a PHP framework for building community sites from scratch. Hosted at github.com/socialapparatus/socialapparatus. The tagline was Software For Building Communities. That organization is gone from GitHub now, the public record is in Wayback only, and the framework itself is lost to a hard drive I no longer have. The domain lives on. It's the domain this blog lives on.

In 2018 I published the Bootstrap 4.1 theme for Elgg to elgg.org. Free. As of today, 2,817 installations, four recommendations. A forums plugin in 2019, 686 installs. Both still active. Both still supported.

The through-line in all of that work is deployable PHP for communities. Not SaaS. Not frameworks-you-host-but-we-monetize. Code you install on your own server and own forever. That instinct is what LaravelDesign carries forward. The stack is new — Laravel 12 and Filament 3 instead of Elgg 1.7 or a custom PHP framework — but the shape is the same.

Eighteen years of the same instinct, finally meeting the right stack. That's what this is.