are you upgrading plugins to 1.9?

i have been upgrading my elgg 1.8 plugins to run on 1.9. so far the changes have been simple and fast. the most complex part will be converting my site's theme.

i decided to progress in 2 stages. stage 1 is to make the needed changes to get the plugins to run at all with 1.9, without errors or warnings. 

stage 2 is to refine the code to improve performance and to make use of new features in 1.9.

i notice that i am using many plugins for other coders in the community, such as coldtrick and matt beckett (among others).. matt has said that he has so many plugins that he is unable to predict how long it will take him to upgrade them all. i am wondering if anyone else is willing/able to offer an eta for their own plugins?
i am also thinking that maybe we could unite to share the load of upgrading the many plugins, once we are more familiar with what is needed and possible.

anyone?

  • I upgraded a number of abandoned 1.7 plugins to 1.8.  A quick site message to the author, or a github issue regarding upgrading is usually enough to determine whether the author is planning to upgrade it, is accepting help upgrading, or has abandoned it.  Usually people don't shy away from receiving PRs.  Note that if you do want to inherit an abandoned plugin we do have the ability to transfer ownership on the community here so there doesn't have to multiple forks floating around.

  • ok, so i will make some notes as i go. there are certainly repeating patterns involved.. and also some parts that i don't presently know how to resolve, such as:

    elgg_register_entity_url_handler is deprecated. use the plugin hook in elggentity::geturl()

    most likely i will upgrade videolist after i have finished my own plugins, since that is one i need to use.. the challenge there is that there are a variety of different sources for the changes, so i will probably create a fork.

  • @ura: check out the start.php of the blog plugin (compare the Elgg 1.9 with the Elgg 1.8 version). The elgg_register_entity_url_handler() usage has been updated to the new plugin hook usage and could provide you an example of how to modify your code.

    @Gerard: declared compatibility with Elgg 1.8 is not supposed to mean "works on Elgg 1.9". Of course, it might be better to fix any announced deprecations as soon as possible (i.e. already fix in an Elgg 1.8 version what will be broken on Elgg 1.9) but some developers seem to have upgraded their Elgg 1.7 plugins only as far as getting it to work on Elgg 1.8 without noticeable issues. Some developers might not even be aware of existing deprecation issues if they never enabled debug output / warnings on their test sites. A useful plugin for identifying deprecation issues is Pawel's Code Analyzer plugin for sure. While it won't identify all issues it will at least list most of them without the need to test out your plugin in all details for the deprecated usage of functions to fire.

    Regarding which plugins to choose for upgrading I would suggest a very selfish approach: first deal with plugins you need for yourself. If the original author does not work on it (no reply when asking about an Elgg 1.9 version, no activity on the community site anymore) and nobody else announced working on a new version I would simply start the upgrading. If you have free time and don't have any need of updated plugins yourself, you could start looking for plugins that were requested to be updated by others.

    Any non-developers could help working on Elgg 1.9, too: additional translations will now be included. So, you could contribute by providing translations of the language files - there's surely help needed in this area at the moment!

  • Want to reaffirm that contributing translations would be a huge help. Much more impact for translators now that we're shipping Elgg with translations included!

    Anyone can go to Transifex to contribute:

    https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/elgg-core/