Matt Beckett has joined the Elgg team as our very first Community Administrator! Please join me in congratulating him, and expect to see some great features roll out on the community the coming months.

We granted Matt admin rights in the community some time ago to assist us with moderation, and now as a full-fledged member of the team he has access to Elgg's servers so he can make some much-needed improvements to the Elgg Community.

Matt's contributions to Elgg can hardly be overstated:

• He fights spam and moderates the Elgg community.
• He gives free, high-quality support to newcomers by answering questions in the forums.
• He has released over 50 plugins.
• He contributes patches to Elgg core.

Tell us about yourself

I'm a British-Canadian family man with an expensive scuba diving habit. I'm a PHP developer, working almost exclusively with Elgg over the last few years, but previously in custom applications and Drupal. I like to think of myself as a "nice guy", and hope that comes through in my dealings with the the community.

How did you get involved with Elgg?

I got involved with Elgg through Athabasca University. I had a personal client I was working on a Drupal site for, they were also having an Elgg application being developed by another contractor who I subsequently had to coordinate with. That developer was building plugins for AU and needed more productivity - I was hired on with no knowledge of Elgg and spent a few weeks dissecting it before creating my first plugin. Ultimately I was hired on directly at Athabasca University for a couple of years to further develop their social network, and now have moved on to a full time position with Arck Interactive.

What will you be working on?

I'm most looking forward to expanding the community site:

• Making tools like the plugin repo easier to use and more collaborative
• Continuing to help out new developers

I'm least looking forward to my continuing daily chore of spam deletion...

Thanks, Matt!

We're very glad to have Matt join us and are excited about the future improvements in store for the community site. If you have ideas for the community, don't hesitate to send us your feedback.