Elgg Blog: Status update

Greetings all!

We've received some emails about the future of the project and our current development plans, so I wanted to address these concerns.

Elgg is still under active development by the core team, all of whom volunteer their time for Elgg. Our development has slowed because each of us has personal and work lives outside of Elgg. For me, as much as I'd love to devote my full attention to Elgg, I still have other responsibilities. 

Our newest team member, Steve Clay, has stepped in during this lull and has been extremely active in developing exciting features for the recent and upcoming 1.8 releases. We've also been very happy to receive a number of pull requests from contributors like Paweł Sroka, Lostmon Lords, Juho Jaakkola, and Team Webgalli. Steve has been instrumental in releasing the last few version of Elgg, and in getting these pull requests in for the upcoming releases.

Looking to the future, the next release of Elgg, 1.8.10, will be out by the end of the year. There are some exciting changes Steve has been working on that should improve performance, hopefully significantly. Following that, we are looking forward to Elgg 1.9, with an anticipated release of Spring 2013.

With 1.9, we're aiming to make the migration process much simpler than the 1.7 to 1.8 transition. One of the things we're looking at is improving the ability for plugin authors to easily Ajaxify Elgg's interface. This is something Elgg lacks compared to similar projects, so we hope to fill that gap.

As always, we appreciate your support, contributions, and understanding as we develop Elgg!

  • @brett what about a block a user function in 1.9 ??

  • Thanks for the update, Brett.

    Thanks Steve for being so active!

  • @brett : thanks for the update. Hope this will put a "full stop" to the rumors and doubts most people having.Cheers ;)

  • Cool, thanks for the update. Like Liang Lee mentioned, a block a user function in 1.9 would be really great, I would make a button to be able to block someone and have them added to a 'blacklist' where if possible it shows which users have been blacklisted. Alot of my members are asking to 'ignore' certain users from comments, private msgs, etc. basically ex-communicating them from that certain individual from ever contacting them again. If this can get done that would be greatly appreciated, its one privacy feature I think should be implemented if possible. Thanks.

  • Thanks Brett! The speed improvement is 1.8.9 release was significant.

  • I'll just clarify that most of these performance optimizations originate from Paweł and Evan, and we continue to see a lot of great patches from everyone else who contributed to 1.8.9. This work is super appreciated and I'm trying hard to make the review and feedback process painless for contributors.

    I also want to improve the UI and usability of a vanilla 1.9 install for both users and admins and so shortly I hope to start focusing attention on these tickets. Many of the ideas are hard to reach consensus on but pretty easy coding.

    As for specific features, comment threads like this one are not an effective way to bring suggestions up. It can happen in any order, but big features tend to have trac tickets, discussions in the Elgg Feedback group and patches via GitHub, patch files or however you can express the changes clearly. BTW the trac situation is much improved though some account admin is still manual due to !#% spam.

  • That's not to say ideas in comments are ignored, but they're too easily forgotten and comment threads tend to lack the focus needed to spec out a feature. There are of course going to be features that are best left for plugin developers to provide, but opening up the spec and design process helps the core team see where the pain points and roadblocks are in the plugin API.

  • Thanks Brett. 

    We'd like to start contributing some fixes, is this the best place to start?

    http://trac.elgg.org/query?status=!closed&difficulty=trivial&col=id&col=summary&col=difficulty&col=status&col=type&col=priority&report=14&order=priority

    I've actually never used github before (still using subversion) so will need to do some research on pull requests, push etc first (all alien to me). 

  • @Brett: I was relly missing such update. Thanks for claryfying things.

    @Steve: I'm really impressed with the work done by you recently (that includes merging pull rquests even via phone ;-) ). Thanks a lot for the effort!

  • @Mark: According to GIT, have a look at Steve's articles

    It's focused on commandline usage, but if you use windows, have a look at tortoise git

    I would additionally advice to read some general introduction on git to get the general overview and underlying ideas.

  • @Mark - Just to confirm, Srokap is leading you in the right direction. GitHub itself is also a good resource for learning: http://help.github.com/

  • @ Steve As you may have read and without knowing what is planned (or even what might further exist in plugins) Gillie's "river add on" displays a very nice way to setting up a system for the site admins. I can suggest further development along those lines (taking the concept beyond activity, to groups and any other area) would make Elgg just that much better. Let me know if I should add a note somewhere else, but I will just keep it simple and suggest "river addon" has some great ideas in it.

  • Thanks Brett and Srokap, ill have a look at these resources and start contributing next week

  • First I want to thank all of you with love and dedication that hold this open source project. There are some of you can not contribute labor because we neophytes in the field but we are aware of the quality of their work. In these circumstances it may be our only contribution, recognize their talent and spread it. Thanks again for your effort being made our little Catholic social network feeds on your love, solidarity and prayers rewarded with their efforts. Thank you all. www.gregem.org

    Sorry if something is missing or clearly understood.

    Translated with google

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