I don't understand the purpose of the elgg1.9 release which is planned in next 2 month

I was just looking at the link "http://trac.elgg.org/roadmap" and came to know elgg 1.9 is planned in next 2 month.

May be I am wrong but what I feel that releasing a new major version may create problem for the existing user which are using elgg 1.8 and using lot of plugin from the community site. Elgg is number one in the any social network platform because of its plugin and community. If elgg 1.9 comes it means older plugin will not work. And I can see lot of community members update their plugin time to time help other community member

Here I have a suggestion for the elgg core developer. Is there any possibility if they can include the feature which they are planning in elgg 1.9 in future release of elgg 1.8 and they can keep doing this?

I am from the CMS back ground where I work in different CMS and seen same issue with the CMS they update their version and they don’t have reverse compatibility and after that they lose their market share .Which I definitely don’t want for elgg.

 

  • why do you think 1.9 will not be backward compatible with 1.8?

  • That’s good point but i am assuming from past releases of the elgg. Where plugin made for older version does not work for newer versions.

     

  • New releases are necessary or development stagnates, you end up getting stuck with design decisions in previous releases that you don't like and have to work around instead of just fixing properly (eg. elgg 1.8 group membership/content visibility resolution).  Versions march onward, that's progress.

  • @Matt Beckett

    So, will there be a compatibilty issue? Tidypics is still marked as 'Release Candidate'

  • Do not assume that plugins developed for 1.8 will not work for 1.9. For example, plugins written for 1.0 worked fine on 1.1 and 1.2 (there were no 1.3 and 1.4 releases). The jump from 1.7 to 1.8 was major because of the changes to the presentation layer. That's not the case for 1.9.

  • According to compatibility, if you don't change the core and don't do any ugly hacks in plugins, I don't think you'll experience much of the problem (if any).

    Usual practice is to deprecate particular feature, and remove it only in the next big release (ie. stuff deprecated in 1.7 should be gone in 1.9, but in 1.8 only throws deprecation notices). IMHO this policy is very lenient on plugin developers since a lot of changes can be easily done with regular expressions (speaking of 1.7->1.8)

    Let's not spread unjustified panic. I'm really looking forward to 1.9 version (maybe not too soon, I'd like to implement few ideas for 1.9 first ;-) ). I think people that have problem now, are ones that didn't take time to work on their codebase since 1.7. According to abandoned plugins, there's probably most problematic part (here are some ideas how to bring them back to life, but that's another topic), but I'd say that plugins widely used and under active development can be upgraded with minimal effort.

    On the other hand, nobody forces anyone to upgrade, benefits should speak for themselves. If smb doesn't wan't to improve elgg's performance and have access to new features - don't upgrade! ;-)

    Edit: Cash was faster ;-)

  • It is not unjustified fear, it is just questions about elgg 1.9 so that we (developers) are prepare if there are major changes.

    If you check the plugins section, there are a lot of 1.7 plugins that were useful and never were ported to 1.8

  • Some flaws in the logic of simply including any planned Elgg 1.9 changes in just another Elgg 1.8.X release: if it wouldn't really matter to add these changes, then you would be right - and I'm surely the Core Developers would indeed do so. But there surely is some reason for not doing it. There might be some API changes necessary - which are only introduced with major new releases. And even if I'm told there won't be any incompatibility issues with plugins, I'm not 100% sure about that before I've not tested this out myself once Elgg 1.9 will be released. There won't be as huge changes as with Elgg 1.8 but I image there still could be the one or other plugin that will need some updating (and if only the tiniest changes...). Another thing to keep in mind is that "deprecated in 1.7" warnings that are only warnings when using Elgg 1.7 or 1.8 will result in something not working anymore in Elgg 1.9 as the deprecated functions will only be kept in the next major version of Elgg but then get removed in 2nd major Elgg version to follow.

    Btw. I don't think Elgg 1.9 will be released within the next 2 months anyway. This seems highly optimistic taking the number of open tickets into account.

    Anyway, something else that might be worth to be considered is the current state of the plugin repository. Is it ready for Elgg 1.9? Or more generally speaking: could it get improved to be easier to use? Currently you can only search either for plugin category OR Elgg version but not for both criteria at the same time. Getting a good idea about what plugins for a specific Elgg version are available for some specific task is quite difficult - maybe even impossible for new users. A lot of plugins can not even get downloaded anymore (links not working anymore due to the changed url format or for other reasons). Cleaning up the repository - and adding some better search and sorting features - seems as important to me as working on Elgg 1.9.

    Also, more people working on getting the old plugins to work again with Elgg 1.8 (and later) is a job that might be as important as getting this "one great new thing" into Elgg core. But Core developers can't do everything alone... If some new people would at least try to participate - maybe starting with upgrading one or two of the old plugins - and then try to maintain the support of these plugins after the original developers long gone, there would be much less trouble when a new major Elgg version gets released. Checking compatibilty and doing some adjustments if necessary would be much less work if more plugin developers would be involved. On the other hand if only a few developers are involved it could easily end in a situation where the next major Elgg release (1.9) is to be published and some of the (even most important) plugins are not yet available for the former version (1.8) - Tidypics...

  • A useful idea was floated to allow plugin owners to grant co-managers of a plugin project. This hopefully would encourage plugin devs to team up and maybe that would lead to fewer unmaintained plugins. Of course devs can always, and often do, team up on github or wherever, but sharing the community-site-related maintenance chores (and limelight for a great plugin) would help.

Feedback and Planning

Feedback and Planning

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