CONS: Simply not everyting we need, looking forward. It's primarily based around a forum and most add-ons retain a similar visual formatting making it look like a forum in all aspects which isn't very inviting and wouldn't retain users.

CONS: Many reveiws/comments online state they've run into lots of bugs which could make it useless in the end. Dolphin may prove to require substantial $$$ for support and programming time to implement bug fixes that might never actually fix the bugs. Also a few commenters stated this software was written badly as a mish-mash of different programming languages (php & xlst?), making it more difficult to customize.

It would be a good idea to check all Modules on http://drupalmodules.com/

CONS: Not an all-in-one, easily or quickly implemented solution. The default Drupal install has little to no functionality for what we need. We must add a minimum of 80+ modules (some listed below) to achieve optimal functionality and thus run into the possibility of incompatibilities between modules requiring individual installation and testing between module installs. Many modules only add a tiny amount of functionality and generally 5 or so much be installed in order to add one main feature.

CONS: Elgg appears to lack sufficient adoption by plug-in developers and it's lifespan and bug state is not determined. Also no Elgg-supplied demo that could be really tested.

Conclusion Comments from one site:

"It's clear, vBulletin is the most used forum software on Internet, and there are tons of reasons for this. First, vBulletin is really powerful, fast, easy to use and have a classic look of a forum software. Secondly, vBulletin has an impressive list of features and provides by default all additional tools a website could need (blog, project manager,...).
We could however notice and deplore that even if vBulletin provides many bundled softwares, they always have the look of the vBulletin them, and give the feeling that it's nearly always a kind of thread and topic layout, with some additional features. This is of course false, but the feeling stays.
The software is really well supported and regularly patched by its editor, which is really reassuring for this kind of software.
Finally, even if vBulletin is not perfect and is quite expensive (compared to an open source forum software), it is so impressive, well developed and powerful that Forum Software Reviews, for the first time, give it the Perfect Rating."

Good comparison of features of PhpBB 3 vs Simple Machines Forum vs vBulletin

CHECK SECURITY VULNERABILITIES ON SOME MODULES HERE

SOME VIDEO TUTORIALS/GUIDES HERE TO AID IN SETTING UP DRUPAL

"Having used Elgg for 3 years, it has revolutionised our approach to online education."
Dr Stanier, University of Brighton

GOOD EXAMPLE: An Article that tries to demonstrate how to use Elgg and Drupal together for an entire school community

SOME GOOD COMPARISONS OF Elgg vs. Drupal (see comments section)

Another comparison:
There are some small differences (and, arguably, some big differences) between Drupal and Elgg.
Elgg offers file uploads for each individual user. These uploads can be tagged (comparable to freetagging in 4.7) and these tags generate rss feeds. These file uploads can be subscribed to via rss; using this method, individual users can set up topic-specific podcasts out of the box. Using Elgg's access controls, individual users can create feeds (and blog posts) accessible to anonymous users, site members, or individual members within the site.
Elgg also allows individual users to have their own collection of rss feeds.
Basically, Elgg offers users pretty granular control over what happens to their content (blog posts, file uploads, rss feeds). All content can be categorized/organized via freetagging.
On the other hand, Drupal allows you to create many more types of sites, and to organize site content in a greater variety of ways. Drupal also allows users/site admins to create more effective navigational menus to provide users with more intuitive ways to access content.
There are other differences, but, after a certain point, simply describing these differences gets away from the essential point of your question.
Elgg, Drupal, and Moodle are all great solutions. The *best* solution for your project will be driven by the needs of what you are trying to accomplish.
If you are trying to set up distance learning for a large number of courses, Moodle would be a good app to explore. Alternately, you could look at a cluster of Drupal sites running off one codebase.
If you want to set up a community/social networking piece to your project, then either Elgg or Drupal could fit. In general terms, a Drupal based community will allow you more centralized control over your site and, by extension, your users -- this centralized control comes via the role based access controls, and via the ability to choose what users post what content into what areas. I need to stress, however, that greater control over user behavior is a design choice, and it's just as easy not to create it if that's what you want.
Elgg provides a more level playing field. The access control over what users can do is less granular, while individual users have more granular control over each specific piece of content.

Discussion via comments that might shed light into how Elgg will evolve or not in the long run, not sure how to take this info as good or bad (problems vs. new financial backing for next version)

SOME Good technical comments from one reviewer showing strengths and weaknesses of Elgg vs. Drupal & Boonex

OTHER: www.forum-software.org/vbulletin/demo

FORUM COMPARISON: www.forum-software.org/forum-comparator/vbulletin/demo

www.forum-software.org/forum-comparator/drupal-forum/demo

socnet.shellmultimedia.com

www.c4lpt.net

htk.tlu.ee/ejump

www.snippr.de/social

dogs24.net

mimundo.peesco.net

www.tickerheads.com

www.hedgehogs.net

www.hansvanderkamp.net

www.uticked.com

els.earlham.edu

$90 - Removes BoonEx links from 1 domain for 90 days

$290 - Removes BoonEx links from 1 domain for 400 days (1 year + 1 extra month).

$790 -Unlimited Time License Removes BoonEx links from 1 domain for unlimited time.

$2900 - SmartPro Removes BoonEx links from 5 domains for unlimited time. Allows mobile apps re-branding. Includes 5 professional installations.

(Might be good to try 6.x-2.0-Alpha4 for best compatibility with modules)

>>> Drupal: Hosting providers that can run Drupal

• Linux
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows XP
• Solaris
• FreeBSD
• OpenBSD
• NetBSD
• Windows Server 2008
• Mac OS

Web Server
• Apache 1.3
• Apache 2.0/2.2
• Microsoft IIS
• Lighttpd
• Nginx

• PHP 5

Based on XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Based on CSS 2.

Accessibility (WAI)
Conformance to AA level.

UTF-8 Support
Default encoding used to support all locales and countries.

This software respects W3C Norms, correctly follows (X)HTML and CSS norms.

The W3C norms are respected, even if the XHTML 1.0 and the <table> layout start to be a little be outdated, and more complex to theme.

• PHP 4
• PHP 5

• XHTML 1.1 Strict

Based on CSS 2

Accessibility (WAI)
Conformance to AA level.

UTF-8 Support
Default encoding used to support all locales and countries.

This software respects W3C Norms, correctly follows (X)HTML and CSS norms.

Also: An extensible RESTful API with results in JSON, serialised PHP or XML, alternate views on a site which allow for easily creating rich mobile applications and powerful event, plugin and widget APIs

Open Data Definition and an increasing number of data portability formats for import / export

AJAX through jQuery and user-definable callbacks

Easy extension for use with caching systems such as memcached, for increased system performance

Use of multiple database connections for scalability (still in development)

SEE ALSO Forums for forum importing options

Required Plugins/Technologies
What the user needs exactly to use this forum correctly.

• HTML and Javascript
• HTML and AJAX

• Plain HTML
• HTML and Javascript
• HTML and AJAX

Recommendations for plugins
• The following PHP libraries are also recommended for some plugins and extra functionality:
• SOAP
• DOM

Web based administration - Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer. SCREENSHOT

Note from Drupal:
Therefore, people adopting Drupal for their web or CMS project should plan for periodic upgrades of their project to the latest major release (every 12-24 months) in order to benefit from the ongoing active support of one of the finest open source development communities.

Installation wizard for fast and easy scripts installation

>>> Drupal: Some Conversation about Versions of Drupal and when to upgrade

The Admin Panel informs you when a new version is released.

Automatic update availability alerts

Caching - The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server's load. Caching be tuned in real time and many high-traffic sites have performed very well under load.

OpenID, OpenSocial

• User Groups
• Restricted access on specific forum
• Multiple administrator allowed
• Moderators on specific forum
• Blacklist
• Warnings
• IP Blocking
• ACL (Access Control List)

Ability to choose event, order ticket and provide matches IDs

- Individual member promotion and membership assignment

- Five types of user account status

• User Groups

Role based permission system - Drupal administrators don't have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group. SCREENSHOT

SEE ALSO User Groups / Organic Groups

SEE ALSO Moderation

Fine-grained access controls

Elgg has always had powerful, granular, access controls for users. For Elgg 1.5 there are two new additions. Users can restrict their content to be only read by people they mark as a friend from any tool in the site. We've also introduced a a user-defined default setting (providing administrators allow users to set one) that will apply to all their content.

Ease of navigating to content likely depends on what is placed on the home page. Certain functionality is not available without registration and sign-in. This may include some menus that make it easier to view each section (blogs, etc.).

Different user membership types (text only, view only, full access)

- Five types of user account status

Ease of navigating to content likely depends on what is placed on the home page. Certain functionality is not available without registration and sign-in. This may include some menus that make it easier to view each section (blogs, etc.).

Free trial membership (admin ability to set up the period length and conditions)

Ease of navigating to content likely depends on what is placed on the home page. Certain functionality is not available without registration and sign-in. This may include some menus that make it easier to view each section (blogs, etc.).

Dean highly recommends having a block on the home page of anonymous users telling them what they are missing by not registering to describe what won't be visible/display for them. This could be the first item in a rotating/sliding features area.

OPTION TO DISABLE PUBLIC VIEWING:
Walled Garden Plug-in
This plugin turns your Elgg site into a walled garden. This means that only those registered on the site can access any of the content.

Different user membership types (text only, view only, full access)

- On-the-fly selection of country flags
- E-mail confirmation routine
- Checking e-mails to be unique
- Members registration form - 2 steps by default

"Last logged-in" information

MD5 encrypted member's password

Free trial membership (admin ability to set up the period length and conditions)

Ability to set required size of "Password" field

- Ability to create any membership type
- Ability to define membership access level
- Ability to define customized membership requirements
- Ability to give permissions to all users to contact each other for free

User authentication - Users can register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website. For use on an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server.

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Node Access modules

OPTION:
Coppa Plug-in
Required your users to agree to an age limit before registration.

SEE SINGLE SIGN-ON SUPPORT ABOVE FOR POTENTIAL WAYS TO INTEGRATE

The "Subscription Manager", that manages private and paying forum software

Graduated pricing, credits system, customizable memberships

- Integrated with PayPal by default
- Supports recurring billing from PayPal
- Can be integrated with any other payment processing company (PaySystems, Authorize.Net, iBill, 2checkout, etc.)
- 100% automated billing system. Script automatically sends purchased information after payment is processed and performs multi-level anti-fraud checks
- Several payment providers could work simultaneously

Smart shopping cart with history

Merchant account integration

Optional displaying of additional photos only to gold or purchased members

Updated admin finance calculator

Free trial membership (admin ability to set up the period length and conditions)

Ability to choose currency image used for transactions

Automatic billing and transactions generation

The User Infraction Manager is a more powerful way to the basic user banishment, and notifies users that do something unauthorized.

Block members (members can block all correspondence from certain members)

- Individual member promotion and membership assignment

Admin interface to create moderators

Top-rated profiles lookup

Photos rating (similar to hotornot.com)

Looks like Google Groups

Forum Groups

ALSO a matching system: Ability to set matches number

SEE ALSO Project Space

Users can create groups around a particular topic and take advantage of a collaborative group discussion area, group files and group pages. You can create open groups that anyone can join, and closed groups, where membership is requested first and accepted or denied by the group owner.

• You can create and moderate as many groups as you like
• You can keep all group activity private to the group or you can use the 'make public' option to disseminate work to the wider public.
• Each group produces granular RSS feeds, so it is easy to follow group developments
• Each group has its own URL and profile
• Each group comes with a file repository, forum, pages and messageboard

SCREENSHOT

Ability to create Couples profiles

Profile Builder

View user's profile via Presence

Direct file uploading to a member's profile

- Customizable profile view
- Browse profiles with narrowing ability

Personal Media Gallery (audio, video and pictures)

Shared Media Gallery (audio, video and pictures)

Zodiac signs lookup in profiles and search results

Essay (extended "About me" section)

Profile ratings

Number of profile views with the ability to list members who viewed the profile

Media (video and audio support for profiles)

HotList (buddies, favorites)

- View Video instead of Photo of the profiles when user's cams are on

Moderators Accounts to approve and edit profiles

Featured profiles generating

Optional profiles auto-approve

Ability to bring random, online, last, and top rated profiles to the home page

Ability to set minimum number of characters for "About me" and "About you" fields

SEE ALSO Views

Elgg comes with a set of default profile fields which can be extended or completely changed by the site administrator.
Using Elgg's powerful widget framework, users can select from a bank of available widgets to create a full and rich profile.
An Elgg profile acts as a great overview of a site member, pulling together their activity from the site, as well as from external sources.

INFO ON ADDING WIDGETS TO A PROFILE

Plugins/Messageboard
The messageboard - similar to 'The Wall' in Facebook or a comment wall in other networks - is a plugin that lets users put a messageboard widget on their profile. Other users can then post messages that will appear on the messageboard.
You can then reply directly to any message and view the history between yourself and the person posting the message.
The messageboard can also be placed on group profiles.

MESSAGEBOARD SCREENSHOT

Improved and expanded Builders: Fields Builder

Admin User-friendly profile fields modification system

Member's Pictures Customized Water Mark

Plugins/Avatar
The user avatar represents a user (or a group) throughout the site. By default, this includes a context-sensitive menu that allows you to perform actions on the user it belongs to wherever you see their avatar. For example, you can add them as a friend, send an internal message, and more. Each plugin can add to this context menu, so its full contents will vary depending on the functionality active in the current Elgg site.
Users can use Elgg's built in avatar editor to crop an uploaded profile photo into something they would like to use as their site wide avatar.

MORE INFO & SCREENSHOTS

Advanced control panel for members (profile status and all-contacts information)

Registration Security Images

Flexible Site Width

Site layout - from 1 to 4 columns

Flexible layout for Shoutbox, Video Player and Music Player

Admin initial preset of Presence vertical size

Easy text, code, graphics modification

Templating - Drupal's theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don't have to learn a proprietary templating language.

Plug-in / Module / Add-On

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Rotator / Slider Modules

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Node Ordering Modules

NOTE: Must change a number of links back to the Elgg.org and Elgg.com sites. When first loaded the platform has several links which intuition says should lead to the community's home page but they actually target Elgg.

Modify the style of your forum easily.

Global and Forum Specific

Possible Starting Point Themes:

Zen (easier than Garland or Bluemarine)

>>> Drupal: My favorite module or theme is outdated. What next?

LISTS OF THEMES, SOME WITH SCREENSHOTS

Site's styles file modification

- Quick search
- Advanced search
- Sorting and search narrowing
- ZIP codes search options
- Matchmaking (auto search based on user-specified criteria)
- Cupid mail (matchmaking results auto-sending)
- Search for online members, searching members, communicating (in IM) members

Zodiac signs lookup in profiles and search results

Automatic member gender prompt for profiles search

Search results can be presented in the form of a photo gallery

Admin can Search by ID, e-mail and nickname

Searching - All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Search modules

System-wide, tag-based searching across all content and users

"Threads Tags", that helps classifying topics.

ALSO "Similar Threads", that provides an estimation of threads that could match to the same topic of the current thread.

Module/Add-On

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Similiar / Relevant by term block modules

>>> Drupal: Comparison of CCK/Taxonomy Modules

SEE ALSO Wiki & Taxonomy

A Patch is available

Search-Engine-And-User-Friendly URLs

User friendly links (ModRewrite function)

Friendly URLs - Drupal uses Apache's mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.

Permalinks - All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or "perma link" associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.

SEE ALSO Hyperlinks in the Forum section

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Lightbox-type modules

Lightbox Add-On ($15)

• Forum Categories
• URL Redirection Forum
• Sub Sections
• Trashcan Forum

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Links Page modules

The site administrator can set site-wide categories. These categories are then available for users to use when creating a new blog post, uploading files or constructing pages. A great way to provide some loose structure.

Official: English, German, Chinese, Hungarian; Translatable into any language. vBulletin provides a localization features that could virtually make it work in any languages... if you translate it.
Translations packages are of course also available.

Multiple languages support

Integrated language file modification capabilities

Multi-language - Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application. All text can be translated using a graphical user interface, by importing existing translations, or by integrating with other translation tools such as the GNU gettext.

Easy internationalisation support via user-contributed language packs add-ons

Advanced Banner System and Adsense Integration

Links exchange campaign

Banners rotation system management

Help pages

Online help - Like many Open Source projects, we can't say that our online help is perfect but have built a robust online help system built into the core help text. Available to you on your own site.

Displaying the number of registered members from defined countries who are online/present

Admin ability to set Cupid mail options

Web based administration - Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer. SCREENSHOT

Unique among forums

Analysis, Tracking and Statistics - Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site. SCREENSHOT

Logging and Reporting - All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time. SCREENSHOT

Guessing Yes

Friends List

HotList (buddies, favorites)

Also: FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.
FOAF is a descriptive vocabulary expressed using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Computers may use these FOAF profiles to find, for example, all people living in Europe, or to list all people both you and a friend of yours know. This is accomplished by defining relationships between people. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as the person's e-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI of the homepage or weblog of the person), which is used when defining these relationships.

Also: Social graph functionality (relationships between users and other users, objects and sites)

One-click lists with online users

"Online/Offline" user status

Messenger with storing system

Gmail Like Mailbox Conversations Archive

Private communications using text, audio and video simultaneously

Double-blind messaging

Send a "whisper" message to a particular user

>>> Drupal: VIDEO on Life Beyond E-mail: Messaging & Notifications (bad audio though)

Private messaging can be sent to users by clicking on their avatar or profile link, providing you have permission. Then, using the built in TinyMCE editor, it is possible to format the message. Each user has their own inbox and sentbox. It is possible to be notified via email of new messages.
When users first login, they will be notified about any new message by the messages notification mechanism in their top toolbar.

MESSAGE NOTIFICATION SCREENSHOT

Newsletter

E-mail notifications/newsletter system

Private communications using text, audio and video simultaneously

Configurable Flash-based online live-chat system

"Online/Offline" user status

Customizable sounds in IM for incoming messages, user login/logout, video/audio files start/stop viewing

Invite to 1-to-1 Private chat

Create password protected rooms

"Invitation Denied" notification message in IM

IM dialog history

Send any file to each other using IM

Plug-in Available

Here's one in experimental phase

Room history

Rooms list with the members info (photo, nickname, sex, age, user's type) in any room

Users can track who's viewing their video streaming in Chat

Chat in several rooms simultaneously

Private communications using text, audio and video simultaneously

Seamless connection to user's cameras and mics

- Tabs and multiple rooms in Video Chat
- 1-to-1 private rooms in Video Chat
- Floating video panes in Video Chat and Video Messenger
- Full-screen video in Video Chat, Video Messenger and Video Player

Audio/video conferencing with a multi-media headset

Users can track who's viewing their video streaming in Chat

- Video streaming in a Separate Window (full screen mode)

- View Video instead of Photo of the profiles when user's cams are on

ALSO: Plugins/River
An Elgg river widget
The river plugin provides a number of widgets that display latest activity based on a user or a user's friends. Each entry shows who performed an action and allows you to click through to them and the subject of that action.
This information is gleaned from the system log. An entry is only displayed if an individual plugin has provided information about its activities in a form that the river can understand, and entries are limited to operations that the user has been allowed to see.

SCREENSHOT

Receive an email when messages are posted in followed threads.

Topics Flagging

'My Topics' watching

Mega-cool Live Tracker

Live post tracker - "Forum Spy"

via E-mail

>>> Drupal: VIDEO on Life Beyond E-mail: Messaging & Notifications (bad audio though)

>>> Drupal: Comment Notifications Comparison

Presence status indicators (I don't know what this is)

Online members or friends tracking

The wire brings microblogging to the core Elgg package - like having your own personal Twitter service. Users can post to the wire via the site and SMS (through an optional extra).
You can push wire posts out to Twitter so your users can localise usage while still taking advantage of their Twitter account - or you can deploy this to your intranet in order to allow your employees to keep up to date with their colleagues' current status.

Plugins/Status
User status message
The status plugin appears on a user's profile page. It is possible to update the status message as often as required. Each update will appear in the user's activity stream. A history is also available, providing an interesting overview of a user's thoughts, over time.

SCREENSHOT

- Enable/disable guests posting messages in Shoutbox
- Set number of displayed messages
- Preset the Shoutbox height

SEE ALSO Views

Dashboard
Elgg ships with a flexible user dashboard, which can be replaced by the activity view if required. The dashboard acts as a user's personal portal to the site, displaying information - both from the site and external sources - that they select

SCREENSHOT

INFO ON ADDING WIDGETS TO A DASHBOARD

Friends Only and Registered Only permissions for GuestBook comments

RSS 2.0

Allows customizing what is syndicated.

RSS feeds support. Subscribe to or live-bookmark forums

RSS 2.0

Content syndication - Drupal exports your site's content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a News Aggregator browse your Drupal sites feeds.

Each Elgg site can take advantage of granular RSS

RSS, FOAF, XFN for content syndication

News aggregator - Drupal has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. The News Aggregator caches articles to your MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable.

Using the News Aggregator

SEE RSS Feeds & Content Syndication above for more

Multiple views, allowing for mobile applications and embeddable widgets as well as the traditional web browser view

Invite / tell a friend

ALSO third party integration like Octazen scripts
- Invite friends from 10 different social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, Xing, Bebo, MeinVZ, Hyves, etc.)
- Supports Facebook Connect
- Supports social network captcha challenges

Elgg provides users with a simple social bookmarking tool. Using a button that users can place on their browser toolbar, it is easy to bookmark and share resources from all over the web.

An Elgg file repository RSS feed automatically doubles as an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to new audio content using programs like iTunes. Using the zaudio plugin, supplied in the default Elgg package, MP3 audio files are also directly playable in the page.

- Default integration of Ray Community Widget Suite
- Default integration of Orca Interactive Forum Script

Topic pagination

Discussion forums - Full discussion forum features are built into Drupal to create lively, dynamic community sites.

ALSO There's a Vanilla Forum integration Plug-in (see comments for user problems)

Threaded comments - Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.

ALSO Custom Thread Icons
Add new custom Thread Icons

ALSO Custom Thread Icons
Add new custom Thread Icons

On-the-fly photos auto-scaling

Automatic photos upload system

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Image-handling modules

On-the-fly photos auto-scaling

Automatic photos upload system

SEE ABOVE IN Image Attachment for more options that might both attach and insert

SEE ALSO Photos section below

Photo gallery
When a user uploads photographs or other pictures, they are automatically collated into an Elgg photo gallery that can be browsed through. Users can also see pictures that their friends have uploaded, or see pictures attached to a group. Clicking into an individual file shows a larger version of the photo.

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Image-handling modules

A/V files recording and sharing

Convert any kind of video format

Optimized audio/video streaming control

Full-screen video in Video Player

A custom snapshot for thumbnail of the video

SEE ALSO Video section below

A/V files recording and sharing

Optimized audio/video streaming control

SEE ALSO Audio section below

Multiple Files

Direct file uploading to a member's profile

Automatic photos upload system

Elgg comes equipped with a full file repository that will handle a wide variety of data including photos, word documents, audio files, videos, PDFs and more. You can easily flip between lists of files and image galleries, in order to comfortably find the item you're looking for.
Users can display their latest files on their profile and - using the media embed tool - embed any file into their content.

The file repository allows users to upload any kind of file. As with everything in an Elgg system, you can filter uploaded files by tag and restrict access so that they're only visible by the people you want them to be. Each file may also have comments attached to it.

WYSIWYG text formatting

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Drupal WYSIWYG Editors

X NO Custom BBCodes except by Module below

ALSO Custom Emoticons
Add new custom Emoticons packs

Smiles Pack

Drag'n'Drop-able emoticons and external photos

Animated Emoticons

ALSO Custom Emoticons
Add new custom Emoticons packs

Emoticons were also reported as requiring a plug-in

You need to import them
Goto admin/settings/smileys/import and import the package you extracted. Then you can find them on the list page and play with them.

AJAX-powered forum folders

Navigation breadcrumbs

"Sticky" topics

Topics Flagging

'My Topics' watching

Mega-cool Live Tracker

Live post tracker - "Forum Spy"

Set by admin

Nested

"Reply with quote" option in forums

Admin interface to create moderators

Admin interface to create moderators

ALSO Integration with Drupal or Joomla

Blog (photo upload, user can create different categories, permissions, comments)

Personal Blog

Ability to post own articl

Blogger API support - The Blogger API allows your Drupal site to be updated by many different tools. This includes non-web browser based tools that provide a richer editing environment.

A weblog, or blog, is arguably one of the fundamental DNA pieces of most types of social networking site. The simplest form of personal publishing, it allows for text-based notes to be published in reverse-chronological order. Commenting is also an important part of blogging, turning an individual act of publishing into a conversation.
Elgg's blog expands this model by providing per-entry access controls and cross-blog tagging. You can control exactly who can see each individual entry, as well as find other entries that people have written on similar topics. You can also see entries written by your friends (that you have access to).

Unsure to what extent but guessing full.

Users create their own blogs.

Elgg's blog expands this model by providing per-entry access controls. Elgg's blog expands this model by providing per-entry access controls.

Dynamic Comments System

Personal Weblog commenting

Set by Admin I believe.

SEE ALSO Node Ordering

Easy to follow calendar

- Ability to set up events, place, time and event manager's contact info
- Ability to set up events and place a picture

mixed info on this as somewhere else reported so I need to verify:

Not by default

Module/Add-On

>>> Drupal: Comparison of CCK/Taxonomy Modules

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Glossary-type modules

SEE ALSO Tagging

Can be integrated with Drupal or Joomla

Site Pages Builder

Fields builder

Navigation menu builder

"Links", "FAQ", "About us", "Contact us", "Privacy", "Terms of use", "Services" pages

Improved and expanded Builders: Fields Builder, Pages Builder

User's articles

Permalinks for: Articles, Blogs, News, Shared Photos, Shared Music, Shared Video, Groups, Events, Classifieds

New members (auto-displaying of photos of latest registered users on the main page)

"Random Quotes" system

Ability to post own article

News module with admin tab

Automatic success stories posting with "latest story" feature

"Articles" system for more text content

Includes Web Site Home page

Version control - Drupal's version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to your content and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables you to roll-back content to an earlier version. SCREENSHOT

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Links Page modules

>>> Drupal: Comparison of CCK/Taxonomy Modules

>>> Drupal: Comparison of Node Access modules