This is alpha software. Please do not use it in production.

The Elgg team is excited to announce the immediate availability of Elgg 2.0.0-alpha.1 for download. This pre-release of Elgg 2 is meant for early testers and plugin developers who want to get a head start upgrading plugins to make sure they are ready when 2.0.0 final is released.

Plugins authors can read through the plugin upgrade instructions for details on what they will need to change. For the most part, breaking changes should not affect those who have already updated their 1.x-compatible plugins to the latest APIs and coding standards.

Here are some highlights:

• PHP 5.5+ is required.

• Discussions is now a separate plugin from groups.

• The plugin manager page in the admin area has been much improved.

• Initial render time over 2G has been reduced by ~85% for almost all pages.

• Simplecache resources can be served directly by the web server.

• We dropped login-over-https. For the security and privacy of your users, serve your whole site over HTTPS instead.

For developers:

• Besides JS and CSS, you can now serve images, HTML, and many other asset types through Simplecache by placing your custom assets in the views system.

• Elgg 2 can be installed as a composer dependency, which makes upgrading and duplicating sites significantly easier.

• When installed as a composer dependency, you may use the root directory to make site-local modifications. There is no more need to define a plugin just to customize a single site.

• Overriding the home page (and many other pages) is much easier now that we use the views system to render pages.

• You can easily define custom locations for individual views using a views.php config file.

Watch the blog for further announcements and updates about 2.0. We look forward to your feedback and questions!

Contributors

• Steve Clay (64)

• Evan Winslow (55)

• Jeroen Dalsem (28)

• Jerôme Bakker (14)

• Juho Jaakkola (6)

• Ismayil Khayredinov (2)

• Paweł Sroka (2)

Features

• views:

  • added a generic by_line page element for content objects (1a5bcb64)

  • comments form value is now html5 required (ba9f4301)

  • login and register form now have html5 required fields (f8c505ca)

  • Allow mapping views dirs via views.php files (9ba31f20, closes #8546, #8550)

  • Nearly all plugin static resources are in views (b8a8864c)

  • Allow specifying exact view paths via views.php (f3881cf4, closes #6844, #8515, #8527)

Performance

• engine:

  • Viewtype is auto-detected only once (541a5cd1, closes #8438)

  • Reduce method calls when fetching from service provider (5561fec9)

• js: Remove jquery-migrate and upgrade jquery to ^2.1.4 (8f58da98)

• scripts: Load all scripts in foot regardless of registered location (c91f1f3e, closes #2718)

• simplecache:

  • Faster serving in case symlink not used (85c2e888)

  • Allow 304 responses even with simplecache off (14bd68fb)

• views:

  • only draw menus when they are used (b9f85e4c)

  • Allow serving assets directly from filesystem (c4c5734d, closes #8381)

Documentation

• head: Remove out-of-date JS docs (23c3d036)

• icons: Add docs for Font Awesome changes in #8578 (eb9bcde3, closes #8625)

• routing: Update custom_index to demonstrate latest best practices (0142a5f0)

• upgrade: Clean up docs around PDO upgrade (fdfa4d7f)

• upgrading: documents comments hook return values (b9d975f0)

Bug Fixes

• actions: Misspelled action levels no longer treated as logged_in. (d936549a, closes #8337)

• admin: admin.js no longer fails on the plugin text file page (a4e2ce00)

• breadcrumbs: hide the last breadcrumb if it’s not a link (a1bec58f, closes #6419)

• comments: allow comments hook to return empty strings (37321a14)

• database: Uncallable callback arguments now throw exceptions (1e65aa10, closes #6937)

• events: All hook/event handlers are now weighted properly (3e6a2898, closes #1378)

• https: Drop login-over-https (c0e81a40, closes #5729)

• output: fewer view $vars will be output by accident (4560d389, closes #8218)

• river: Improves alignment of filter select and nests inside label (4f903c1e)

• site_notifications: correctly position site_notifications menu (22d14acb)

• ui: Eliminates FOUC in Firefox (8244ae61, closes #8328)

• views: do not drop elgg-button-submit class when using input/submit (1e8e3e6f)

• zaudio:

  • AudioPlayer now works via AMD module in IE9 (4b0768b8)

  • Convert zaudio JS to AMD modules (674899e0, closes #8283)