A lot of this was done by introducing a query cache into database.php which caches the results of individual queries. I also introduced some new delayed execution functionality on database queries - letting you delay some database operations until after the page has been sent to the browser.

All of these tweaks have slashed the number of queries being executed per page.

This week I also began to experiment with memcache - currently caching entities, datalists, metastrings and meta data. Reducing the number of queries per page to ~7 once the cache has been populated.

I also did a little bit of work on the activity stream, river and syndication... but more on this later...

If you're new to Elgg, you'll be surprised by its flexibility and ease of use. But if you're already running Elgg, why should you upgrade to version 1.1? Here's a couple of reasons:

Your site will run significantly faster. Elgg 1.1 contains database and cache enhancements that make it dramatically more efficient on your server and speedier for your users.

Make your Elgg site your own. Themes are available from the Elgg Community, which can be used as tutorials to create your own look. The under-the-hood theme enhancements mean you can create your own icon sets and fine-tune your community's user experience. Oh, and you can easily edit those profile fields, too.

Build exciting new features. If you're a programmer, the plugin APIs now let you do more, whether you want to design an excellent iPhone interface for your site or link it to a new data format. There are more and more plugins being released every day over on the community, and we'll be adding some interesting new applications to the mix.

On top of this, we've fixed some common issues, made the installer more robust, added log rotation and garbage collection on unused database items and let you control the order plugins are loaded in.

Elgg 1.1 can be downloaded from Elgg.org.

• Downloads: in the past 6 weeks downloads of Elgg equate to 1/3 of the total number of downloads since we launched Elgg in March 2005.
• Plugin contributions: since opening up the Elgg community site three weeks ago, plugin contribution equates to 3/4 of the total number of plugins submitted to Elgg since launch in March 2005.

Ben and Marcus volunteered on the OFE stand at the Linux Live Expo this week, both had an interesting time, meeting with other vendors and checking out some of the OS projects on display.

Here is an Elgg presentation given at the recent Barcamp Delhi.

The Elgg team is gearing up to release v1.1 on Nov 3rd.

The Elgg conference on Dec 1st is shaping up nicely, we have around 10 spaces left, so if you want to come, get yourself registered http://elgg.org/events/.

This week we released the v1.5 roadmap. Some very exciting developments on there.

If you are a provider of Elgg services; hosting, custom builds etc. get in touch and tell us a little about it.

Now that we have polls running on the main community site, they are allowing us to gather some interesting figures. Here are a couple of results so far.

1)What is your current desktop browser?

• Firefox v2:7%
• Firefox v3: 64%
• IE6: 0%
• IE7: 7%
• IE8: 2%
• Opera: 2%
• Safari: 15%
• Other: 3%

2)How are you using / planning to use Elgg?

• In education (eLearning) 12%
• As a social Intranet for organisations 9%
• Custom social network 78%
• Other 1%

This week saw the release of some new Elgg themes and theming tutorials. Due to the radical overhaul Elgg underwent for v1.0, it was important to spend some quality time gathering user feedback, tweaking various components and sorting out a few remaining issues before getting stuck into creating new themes. There are a couple of different styles available that people can use as a base for their own themes. Here are a couple (click for larger image).

Soundtrack highlights of the week: Ian Brown F.E.A.R (Unkle mix) and Oasis Dig Out Your Soul

We started the week with the ongoing push towards Elgg 1.1, including a number of bug fixes and some translations. The biggest change this week was to move sessions over to a database store - this provides more scalability options as well as making things more secure on shared hosts.

This week also saw the development of the first version of our commercial SMS server that provides both outbound and inbound SMS channels for Elgg installs to hook into. This included a sophisticated client side library which provides simple yet powerful tools for hooking into this feed - the proof of concept was to add SMS functionality to The Wire (so you can now post your Elgg community thoughts on the road!)

More on this to come...

On Thursday, Ben and I were helping out at the OFE stand at the London Linux Expo. We got to meet some very cool people and talk about open standards (such as OpenDD), introduce Elgg, and generally big up FOSS.

I had a good look around the show. The contrast with the Linux side and the Mac side in terms of style was striking.

It depressed me somewhat that the Open Source Village (with a few exceptions like Open Street Map) was pretty much a lesson in what not to do.

It was good to see the projects there, and its great they were given this space. But most people there seemed to be more interested in staring intently at their laptops rather than talking to people or interacting with the other projects.

Contrast this with projects like Ubuntu which had people giving keynotes and wandering around chatting to people.

No prizes to see who is more likely to still be around in a years time...

But, on a positive note, while I was there I discovered that GoDaddy (one of the largest hosts and domain name resellers in the world) are now offering Elgg hosting and support!

And finally, after spending the day working on a commercial build, I spent 15 minutes building a small plugin which enables The Wire to push messages to Twitter. It is now possible to send an SMS to your wire and then out to your twitter - all through some loosely coupled drop-in plugins.

Cool eh?

Over the coming weeks Elgg users can expect to see a whole range of new themes that we hope will demonstrate just how much control you have over theming an Elgg application. The first two (see thumbnail right) are basic ones to help those interested in theming get to grips with the components of an Elgg theme. As time goes on, we shall experiment more to include different layouts and styles.

To find out more, visit the Elgg theming group.

Happy theming!

We'll have more meets over the next few months; if you'd like us to come to your neck of the woods, get in touch. (Remember that we can also arrange more formal training sessions.) In addition to this, we'll be helping out on the Open Forum Europe stand at the Linux Expo Live at London Olympia this Thursday, October 23, and on Saturday, October 25th. Of course, we've also got the International Elgg Conference on December 1st in Brighton.

Last week was awesome, Elgg-wise; we covered the ground necessary for the release of Elgg 1.1, which will be on Monday, November 3rd. Extra APIs were made available that make themes more powerful, and have paved the way for things like Gravatar support. We're also about to publish our roadmap leading to version 1.5, due in February.

Development is continuing quickly: we've got some plugins coming that will make it even easier to develop new functionality on Elgg's engine, as well as some great themes that will take you through different aspects of making Elgg look right for your purposes. More on this soon.

A lot of people have been picking up the code and contributing. The Community site we launched earlier this month seems to have been a big hit with people and we are seeing some really quite useful stuff fall out of the mix.

As we approach the release of Elgg 1.1 I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about what I call "doing things the Elgg way".

Elgg is built to be modular and pluggable, so this means always thinking about how you can let others safely hook in and extend the way your code works.

We make extensive use of the events system, so for example when an entity is created or updated it triggers an event. Other bits of code can chose to listen to this event and do something.

This is for example how logging works.

The Elgg system log simply listens to events in the system, and when an event is triggered on an object which can be logged it writes the appropriate entry in the system log.

This can be then further processed by the River or Activity viewer, which brings us rather nicely into the subject of views (which we have talked a bit about before).

The activity stream and the river both work off the system log and use the views system. What happens is that when either of these is displayed the code looks to see if it has a view to render a given item in the log, and if so it renders the event.

This is very flexible, since it means that any plugin can come along and add and extend the river or activity stream - adding custom views for its own entities or extending other entities - all of which without touching a single line of core code.

This is a pretty big win, and this is part of what it means to develop the Elgg way.

Some of the Elgg team were down in Brighton consulting at the University of Brighton to work out a strategy for migrating their 50,000 user, classic Elgg install, to the new Elgg code base. We also discussed some cool custom developments.

We had the Brighton Elgg meet, where we met some cool people doing interesting work, some with Elgg. Ben fell in love with Brighton and both he and Marcus were digging this co-working space. I have to admit, it does have a decent tech scene compared to most parts of the UK.

A little late, but still worth mentioning, open source software now stands a better chance within UK education.

We have announced details of this year's International Elgg conference, which will be held in Brighton on Dec 1st. If you fancy coming along then please register on the event site, the core Elgg team will be there.

We had a few drinks with the team behind a cool site, The Brighton Gallery.

Some of the Elgg team have volunteered to help out on the OFE stand at next week's Linux Live Expo. If you are interested in Elgg, or more importantly open source software, please come along and say hi!

Possibly the most pleasing aspect of the past few weeks has been the way the Elgg community is growing. More and more people are working on cool plugins, patches and helping us optimise the software.

A reminder that if you are in Edinburgh on Sat and looking for something to do between 3-5pm, the Edinburgh Elgg meet is on at the Peartree Pub. Feel free to drop by, if for no other reason that they serve Deuchars IPA (my favourite beer!).

We are still working on a schedule for the day but wanted to let those interested know the date as soon as possible in order for it to be marked into their diaries.

It will follow our usual format: presentations, demonstrations and then a panel Q&A to wrap things up before heading to a venue in the town for some beer and food.

If there is enough interest, we might look to hold a code-a-thon the following day.

If you would like to attend this year's event, please head over to the event page and register.

If you are using Elgg and would like to showcase your work in one of the demonstration slots, please get in touch: info@elgg.com.

We look forward to seeing some of you there.

A couple of people have mentioned that it looks significantly different to the core Elgg install, and that therefore it must be running on a hacked version of Elgg. This is not the case: the Elgg Community runs on a clean version of the latest codebase in our Subversion repository.

So how did we do it?

Once of our design decisions from the beginning has been to make Elgg as extensible as possible, without having to alter the core code. This means that when a new version of Elgg comes along, you can simply overwrite your core with the next version, without having to worry about which files you altered - all your modifications are neatly stored elsewhere, and will persist on upgrade. The result is a safer, leaner system.

One important feature of the Elgg Community is the ability to upload plugins and themes. This is a plugin in itself, and was actually modified from the existing file repository you can download from elgg.org. While the original detects the type of file from a given MIME-type, we restricted the files to popular archive formats, added a couple of fields (including a mandatory license), and set the type to either be "plugin" or "theme". Extra submenu items were also added, to allow you to easily view all plugins and themes separately. The events system is a completely new build, but is also a separate plugin.

The profile was forked from the original, largely to provide a different set of profile fields. In future versions of the profile plugin, this will no longer be necessary, and at this point we'll move back to using the core functionality.

However, the major changes were to do with themes. The dashboard was overridden (by assigning a page handler to 'dashboard') to the same code as the front page, which in turn was replaced with a friendly view on the latest activity. This was written as a custom page, with a couple of calls to list_entities to bring out objects of various types.

Each view in Elgg can be overridden - see the overview page for more information. Therefore, all style changes, including some changes in the underlying Javascript and in icons, are stored in a single theme plugin. We'll be releasing some new themes soon, so you can see how it's done, but the change is striking: when the plugin is disabled, Elgg looks as it does on release. Enable it, and elements throughout the site completely change. In fact, we've been conservative with this to date; you can completely change the layout of everything. This blog is another example of a themed Elgg site that overrides a clean core installation.

We're really excited about Elgg's flexibility. To make it easier for newcomers to the system, we're going to be releasing a set of shorter, simple tutorials on various topics, as well as more sample plugins and themes so you can learn from examples. In the meantime, the Elgg Community is a great place to get started.