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About HumHub

This guide will give you a brief introduction to the basic concepts and components of the HumHub platform and should help you to decide whether HumHub fits your needs.

What is HumHub?​

HumHub is an open source social network platform with a wide variety of use cases such as social intranet, community or collaboration platform. HumHub consists of a core application, which can be extended through additional modules and adjusted to your needs by many configuration options.

Common use cases for HumHub are:

  • Public or private communities
  • Enterprise Social Intranet
  • Schools
  • Agencies
  • Municipality
  • Associations

Besides this documentation site and the core software, the HumHub platform consists of further HumHub related projects and resources worth visiting:

Key benefits​

The HumHub platform aims to provide a flexible core platform and some official modules for others to build their own social network with many customization options, such as a module system, marketplace, and theming mechanism as well as an intuitive user interface also suitable for non technical users.

Some of the key benefits are listed below:

  • Free to use
  • Self hosted or hosted on our cloud hosting
    • Keep your data safe, without the need to share it with any external services
  • Simple installation and maintenance
  • Highly customizable
    • Custom theme support
    • Custom module support
    • Many configuration and fine tuning options
  • Open source
    • Transparent development and discussions
    • Community support and contribution
    • Direct contact to the core development team
    • Many eyes principle
  • Translated into more than 40 languages
  • Marketplace for modules and themes
  • Intuitive user interface

Requirements​

Besides meeting the system requirements, a HumHub system administrator should be familiar with the setup and maintenance of a web server environment e.g. LAMP Stack and should be able to:

Basic Concepts​

The following section provides a short overview of the basic concepts supported by the HumHub core software.

Users & Groups​

Users of a HumHub network are assigned to one or multiple user groups. User groups are used to manage group level permissions as for example the permission to create spaces or access certain areas of the network as the directory. You can either automatically assign new users to a certain group or let them choose from a set of user groups in the registration process.

Depending on your requirements, HumHub allows you to either run a private or a public network by enabling or disabling limited access for guest users. When enabling limited access for guest users, non-authenticated users will have access to certain areas and see public contents of your network. Private networks, on the other hand, can only be accessed by existing users and either allow new users to register manually or solely by invite and may also require a group administrator to approve users registrations.

Spaces​

HumHub networks are usually separated into multiple spaces. A space serves as an independent area within your network with an own set of members, permissions, settings and modules. Most content created within a network as posts, events or wiki pages are linked to a specific space. Depending on the use case of your network, a space could be created for each project, department or any kind of community topic. You can even allow your users to create and manage their own spaces. That said, spaces are a fundamental part of most HumHub networks.

Streams​

In HumHub, streams are used to display and filter recently created contents and activities. The following types of streams are available in the HumHub core software:

  • Space stream: This space level wall stream includes contents related to a specific space
  • Profile stream: This profile level wall stream includes contents related to a certain user and by default also includes content created by a user within spaces
  • Dashboard stream: A network wide wall stream includes contents of spaces and profiles a user is following
  • Activity stream: Sidebar stream which lists activities within the whole network or on space level

Activities​

Beside the wall streams, which display actual content entries as posts or calendar events, the activity stream lists various information about recent activities within the whole network or a single space. An activity for example could be a new member joining a space or a user liking a post. Activities are also part of the summary mail sent out to users to keep them up-to-date with recent network activities.

Posts​

In HumHub, posts are the simplest form of content and are included in the core platform. Users can create posts directly within the start page of a space or on their user profile wall. HumHub provides a WYSIWYG editor for most text based contents in order to add simple formatting as headlines or bold text as well as oEmbed or file uploads. As in most social network platforms, posts can be commented on, liked, or archived.

While posts are the only content type included in the core software, there are many modules available supporting further kinds of content, such as meetings, calendar events, or wiki pages.

The search system can be used to search for contents, users and spaces and with a little bit of configuration even supports file content search. Refer to the Admin Search section for more information about the search system.

Notifications​

Notifications are sent out to users to inform them about user related events as new comments or likes on one of his/her posts. In contrast to activities, notifications are always directed to a single user and not the whole network or a space. A Notification can be sent to multiple targets like E-Mail, Web or Mobile. HumHub provides fine grained notification settings in order to specify which notifications should be sent to which targets.

Dashboard​

By default, the dashboard is the starting point for all of your users. The dashboard provides a quick overview of all recent contents and activities of all spaces and profiles a user is following and may contains additional sidebar elements as for example a task or calendar overview snippet.

Spaces Page​

The spaces page provides an overview of all spaces that are visible for you. You can filter them by your status (member, following) and search for specific spaces.

People Page​

The people page provides an overview of all users. You can filter them by user group and your relation to them (following, friendship) and also search for specific users.

Topics​

Topics can be used to classify and filter contents within a stream by attaching one or multiple topic labels to a content entry. You can either allow all space members to create a topic, or restrict creating and managing topics to only space administrator or moderator roles.

Modules​

The feature set of your HumHub network can be extended by installing additional modules. A module may add features as new content types or change the behavior of core features or even include custom themes. Many modules can also be enabled on space or profile level. A wiki module for example could be installed on space level, allowing space members to create and manage wiki pages collaboratively, or on user profile level in order to setup a personal wiki.

As mentioned before, spaces do not necessarily share the same set of enabled modules, a module installed on one space does not affect other spaces, unless a module is configured as default module.

info

Checkout the following links for more information:

Professional Edition​

The HumHub Professional Edition consists of a suite of additional modules especially useful in enterprise environments with features as extended LDAP and single sign on (SSO) support as well as an additional enterprise theme.

Further information is available at:

Limitations​

This section gives you some insights about current limitations of the HumHub platform. The following issues are listed here, since they are frequently requested and may are part of your platform requirements. The revision of below issues may be part of a future release, but are not planned in near future and some of them would require major changes in the core software.

  • If you plan to create a platform like Facebook with billions of active users, HumHub won't fit your needs, since HumHub is not designed to support such a large user base. Platforms like this are usually based on Big Data technologies and are way more complex than HumHub.

  • Although we try to make HumHub as customizable as possible by providing a variety of configuration options and official modules, some existing features may not fit your specific needs and will require some custom development effort. Feel free to share your ideas and requirements by opening feature requests on GitHub, but note, that only features useful for common use-cases will be considered.

  • HumHub currently only supports a rather simple content visibility concept with private and public content. While this vastly reduces the overall complexity, it also does not allow custom content visibility settings as for example user group level content visibility.

  • There is currently no concept available or planned for nested spaces or sub-spaces. The topic feature adds some kind of content categorization within a space and can be used to separate/filter contents of a space. Furthermore, the Professional Edition adds a space type feature for categorizing spaces, which allows one additional level of space classification.

  • HumHub currently can not be operated as a real multi-client system with entirely separated user bases. You can deactivate the directory and invite your users to private spaces, but other users will still be found e.g. in the search system or user picker. At the moment of writing, this feature is considered but not part of the release plan. If you want to push forward the development of this feature let us know!

  • The guest mode is limited, there is currently no way for guests to create, comment or like any kind of content.

  • There is currently no payment integration available. If you want to offer community services behind a payment wall, you will have to buy the eCommerce module or implement a custom integration of your payment backend.

How do I get started?​

Get started testing HumHub by