Confused on Elgg direction from here

I sent Cash an email along the line of these thoughts. The entire social paradigm is based (in my opinion) around two core things; a) activity streams (rivers) and b) mini versions (wigets of latest data) of these which can be placed in side columns etc.

Elgg became rooted in the "widgetized layout" of profiles and groups (main page). Why? Who decided this was the future of social network deisgn? I think it was clearly just an early stage development and one that has not sufficiently been addressed or challenged as to its true usefulness.

The idea of Elgg should be for a person to create their own dream network, not for an individual member of a network to be able to widgetize this area or that.

I challenge the Elgg team to re think the path they are on and consider what useful core tools could be developed to assist in the actual layout and design of the various areas of the network.

Gillie's "river addon" is very much what I think the entire Elgg system should be heading to, not just activity, but groups, profile, etc, etc. "Profile" shouldnt be a block of boxed widgets, but another river with side widgets placable by the site admin, not the member. I don't mean to point out Facebook or Linkenedin but some of this seems obvious, or obviously ignored in Elgg's case.

Same as groups. You pick a a two of three column layout, the center is the appropriate river content and the site admin decides what widget info goes into the columns, some stock Elgg and others custom plugin data.

I hope not to effend as the progress has been great, but the focus of layout and widgetizing the system seems poorly updated and rooted in the past.

  • @ Brett  

    Well said and thanks for explaining. As a novice, I am still waiting for the day I can simply place widgets here and there to design the entire networks layout (for all users) :).

    Thanks for all the hard work!

    @ All

    In actuality I was only challenging the core team to re-consider (at some point) the existing widgetized design for the profiles and groups (I have plugins that overide both those features), so I understand it can be done.

    @ Dhrup

    You need a hug.

     

     

     

  • bear hug ? lolz! billy u rilley do wanna ease back @ making your wishes into std features ;) elgg *can be extended! just takes effort; and btw despite my wrist slapping - i *am working on somethang what will deliver on top of elgg -> 95% of those wishes you've vented (but not b/c you asked), if u r not 'following' - it is called the nexGen trickz (i;ve done this before and more recently to create e.g. 11,000 lines of php application code from a mere 50 lines of application declaritive 'code' x 20 @processing screens ) & of course being developed with no moral support whateverr from nada nobody esp from other people who nobody else can really code in php/elgg; just my imaginations running freely ;O the key driver always is 'simplicity', not more advanced code, but stripping away the dross to reveal the power; uno simple reason why my ultra simple, so obvious, so built-into-elgg's design scheme RoleZ/PermZ will change the landcape - so easy one wonders why it just has not been thought of before; before coding 1000`s x 1000`s of liines of advanced extra plugins' php. no more muckiing with about with that funky array structure that's all the toy available @now. a little UI that lets the admin point and click a 'lock' on anything they want to control.. elgg is written under umbrella of 'open source', but via the evidence of all those hot developers who have faded away elsewhere; elgg if not quite 'open'; yes they will argue that github is there open for all contributions, but i've always been a contrarian, never following the rules, that's why.. i don't 'challenge', i only know to code-- but not piling 1000`s loc @plugins onto the core, rather the easier, simpler 'extending' of power. they just never listened, they never will.

  • it is strange that bret profit spends so much energy posting here stuff like '.. I'll also remind everyone that Dhrup is not.. ' rather than exert energies more fruitfully to advance the elgg core for all users. why this preoccuption with 'dhrup, dhrup...' all the time ? while dhrup spends his time all parts of the brain stuck into 'code, code...' trying to find new ways to make elgg better and occasionally will come here to (good naturedly w/ no malice) jive and poke smack some 'impertinent' users of the community.

    surely this community, like any other open source community, belongs to the users, the customers, us,, me, billy, tom, joe, blogg and everyone else who propels platforms such as elgg -> forwards, not to the 'admins', the leads, the developers. that is how i have run my business for a longg time and it works = 'the customer is always right', always.

    i learned in 1991 on a (project lead on a large project) that the whole software business is 'customer-centric', no other way for success! looking around @wordpress, joomla, drupal - we see no egos, no cops waving sticks re: site tos, nothing.. just the mingling of those with interest in advancement - their own sites and agendas, some feedback,, giving-back to the platform's community, code-sharing, friendliness and most important - respect for other humans. those other platforms started circa early 2000's and these days attract $miilions of backing and no b/s. those other platforms have advanced to state of several hundred developers supporting that advance avalanche their offical developers never minge with the common, everyday community users, never post personal attacks and negative comments that may damage the professional businesses of any developers in their communities.

    bilyl was ' In actuality I was only challenging the core team to re-consider... ' read @ ' just jangling the technical chains of the core team.. ' ;-oO

    why won't they just leave me alone and be a part of this community and let us handle our differences in topics, comments, attitudes, sharing.. without 'the court-of-appeal' of the Admins ? like.. just let me be! we can take of ourselves - as billy has done with his response above ;) as everyone else does..

  • I brought up one issue.  I am suggesting a rethink of what a widgetized system could (or should do) out of the box. It wasn't meant to suggest anything is "wrong", only if it might be better. Brett and everyone else suggests that creating plugins to achieve this is the way and the existing widget system is useful to create an "out of the box" experience which gives users some sense of customization and control. I accept that. I do think it is a good idea to have a sandbox area on the community site here where people can follow along what is being planned. Screen shots would be nice.

  • i think DaScooop has a #1 fan, lolz.  This aint kindergarden, if people cant hand Dhrups sense of humor and style of talk, let them find a new playground

  • @billy: u r not reading everything ? not pre-response to what u asked for for, but ideas in my head from before -' working on somethang that will deliver on top of elgg -> 95% of those wishes you've vented (but not b/c you asked), if u r not 'following' - it is called the nexGen trickz ...' i posted a lot of stuff abt nexGen Theme triclkZ @another post. nexGen is all abut throwing away the elhh layour scheme and replacing with a plain whiteboard canvas - where you, the user, admin, devs --  place 'content blocks' blocks. blocks can be anything you want or is pre-builtin nexGen -> you just need to choose a block ny name (+ maybe some parms to drive it) e.g. {tidyPics Date1 Date2 pageLen Sort CssFile} and.. nexGen delivers what you ordered. may take a little time to code al this -- my little nexgen Code Generator for elgg ;oO literally - it will write the (elgg) code for you. user wants profile fields, some @register, some @tabbed areas, some for admin only, some levels of access control? nexGen aims or that;; minus any special plugins, minus any frameworks.. just elgg + nexGen. read around.. ;-P it will be a reality!

  • Dhrup how about putting nextgen on GitHub and let people contribute?

  • @ Dhrup That sounds like some good ideas.

  • why not? asap @there's substantive interest; tho => nexgen discussixn been out abt 3mnths, had 5 ppl make comments, 1 offered help w/code:- 12 yrold speedy; steviec says elgg's 'ecml' already @github; i forgot to comment that a variaxn.v.2 (v1@2002) of nexgen tech spits 11,000 lines of html, css, js, jq, php from ~50 lines of declaritive code; i like to imagine that cud be called 'nexgen'; welcome is contributions frm/ anyone who's worked w/ llr(1), ast, lls, lexan and similar ;oO anyways.. detalils r all there @that page re: nexgen for study for those that wanna jump in deep end.

  • Just a suggestion Dhrup, but if you used real words and readable sentences you might get better feedback.  Half the time I don't read your plugin ideas because it's a couple of paragraphs and I really don't have the time or inclination to parse that much Dhrupspeak.  I imagine I'm probably not the only one.

    Case in point, your post above - the only sentence there I didn't have to slow down and actively work to figure out what you're talking about is:

    why not?