Elgg developers probably noticed that our trac and code sites were offline this Thursday and Friday. We took these services down to make one of the biggest transitions in Elgg’s development history: migrating our code repositories from SVN to GitHub. In addition to changing VCSs, we also moved the sites to the Oregon State University’s Open Source Labs, who donate hosting services to Elgg and a number of other OSS communities.

SVN served Elgg well for over 5 years, however the core team unanimously prefers Git as a distributed revision control system, so we decided to migrate to GitHub. As Elgg continues to grow as an open source project, GitHub’s features make it extremely easy for others to contribute to Elgg’s development and to see those contributions merged into the official source code quickly.

Though we’ve switched to GitHub for our code, we’re still using trac for our issue tracker. Please continue to post bugs to trac.

The switch to GitHub meant some major changes to our trac and code repositories, including full rebasing of the SVN commits to separate repositories on GitHub, additional trac plugins for Git integration and SVN to Git changeset support, and a trac database rewrite for old SVN changesets. We think we’ve ironed out the biggest bugs, but if you encounter anything strange, please contact me at brett [at] elgg [dot] org with details. I also plan to make post about how we migrated our SVN and trac instances to GitHub for those of you interested in the gritty technical details.

These changes will help to merge bugfixes from contributing developers into the source code more easily and quickly than the previous system. If you want to get involved with Elgg’s development, check out the great Elgg-specific guide that Evan submitted and be sure to read the GitHub documentation itself, which is also very useful. If you’re a novice with Git, take a crashcourse to understand all the features and benefits.

If you haven’t contributed to Elgg yet, why not pick a ticket, fork the code, and start squashing bugs!