Elgg needs to fork now!

What is the wide world of sports is going on with Elgg at this point? 1.8 has obviously been a major platform upgrade with tons of new energy, new users, new techonolgies and new plugins. Please Elgg meisters, fork 1.8 from previous versions by dumping this useless, dog slow site and starting a new theme'd site somehwere else, say elgg18.org or whatever. Is keeping this here network up a secret I am missing in scaring people away? Sometimes I feel like it's a big secret, just don't laugh at the community site, there is great things to be had there.

Then I realize, I don't think it is a big secret, I just think the main team needs to face what's right in front of them....keep this site up and let members use it for their 1.7 systems, what have you, but start a new site on a new URL if needed. START A NEW ELGG COMMUNITY THIS PLACE IS LOOKING LIKE A SOVIET UNION ERA COMPUTER SCIENCE EXPERIMENT!!

Catch my drift? Port to a new community. Let Ismayil and Vazco and the guys who have all put alot into the system help theme the site and put some cool plugins into the core as well when you do, it will take like 15 minutes. This place is a morgue....

  • I think rebuilding community page is a must if we want Elgg to be more popular. Upgrading to Elgg 1.8 is not most important. Elgg.org could use eg. better feature description, like this one, better portfolio, tutorial-like introduction for new people, maybe some video, a demo. When you look at the river, you can notice community is shrinking - there are less messages appearing every day.

     

    I think care about increase of community should be priority - bigger community means better support, more funders, more developers and faster growth.

     

    Soon it may be too late - Elgg may disappear due to lack of exposure and competition which is not better in terms of code and features, but better advertised and with more friendly tutorials, demos and community pages.

  • As far as I can see the only problem with the current arrangement is that it needs splitting into seperate 1.7 & 1.8 sections (and later 1.9).

  • Friends, my two cents: Months ago some users asked for community improvements, and one suggestion was a "auto update" feature. I offered the job, cash made the webservices and the plugin is there, ready to use and will be a core plugin soon.

    The community needs a LOT of improvements, but WE are the community. Just fork the site, make the corrections (I did just one, but I did, and Cash accepted the patch) and upload to repo.

    But tahoebilly is right: We need improvements. Professional layout, better tutorials, better documentation and better plugins, maybe with some "recommended by staff", to avoid a lot of "iframes plugins" made by pseudo developers.

    My time is sparse, I need to migrate one plugin to 1.8, but I am here. I can help. Again, I agree with tahoebilly, although the tahoe´s tone was not polite. But he is right. We need to push our community.

    I am a Drupal´s heavy user, and the community is very strong, with a lot of core developers and well supported plugins. But there is no secret. We need to work!

    Again: Someone suggested the "auto update" plugin and Cash and Me made it. Just one improvement, but we can do the other ones. And Cash was very polite and professional with me, giving a lot of support in my personal e-mail.

    Happy Elgging.

  • Vazco: The plugin´s repository is our weaker side. We need to help new users, show most popular plugins, latest updated plugins and so on. I had a chat with Matt and we had the idea for a "relevant" algorithm. Something like ranking = (downloads * 100) + (likes * 100) + (actual date - release date * 10). Something like this. Most downloaded plugins and newer ones could be recommended using the correct formula.

    I will work on this and contact Cash to make some tests.

  • Some key points that don't seem to be getting through:

    1. The performance issues are a lot more complicated than improving Elgg's performance. We are running several sites on a single server (community, blog, wiki, trac). Trac seems to be the worst resource hog out of the sites even though it gets used the least.

    2. The reason we haven't upgraded the community site to 1.8 is because we haven't finished updating the plugins this site uses to work with 1.8 - especially the plugin repository.

    3. There is a demo site at http://demo.elgg.org/

     

    We have lots of ideas for improving the community site. It's easy to come up with the ideas. Implementing them takes time. I haven't even taken a look at the work that Evan put into updating the plugin repository so I cannot comment on how people can contribute to it at the moment. https://github.com/Elgg/community_plugins

  • @Cash: exactly the points I tried to explain above...

    Better keeping the upgrading of the community site on the conservative side. I wouldn't help anyone to hurry with porting the repository plugin to Elgg 1.8 and upgrading the site only to realize later that some major bug was forgotten. THIS would annoy people more than keeping Elgg 1.7 for a bit longer.

    I would also like to point out that everyone should feel free to participate in the in bringing Elgg forward with whatever talents someone can offer. Not everyone is a coder, but there are other ways to participate There have been tutorials mentioned, either videos about certain tasks like installing Elgg or wiki docs (surely most welcome in many different languaged). If you know how to create such tutorials why don't you just do it. There would surely be a way to include them on the community site one way or other. Or maybe you have a talent for creating a professional and appealing site theme. Why don't you offer your help in this matter? Countless other possibilities to bring yourself in...

  • Elgg community has one great asset - attention. Being listed as a person that contributed to development of community has a real value. The bigger is the community, the greater is the value. Maybe it would be good to use this value as an incentive for developers to help with developing community... I have a feeling something has to change, or community will just keep degrading...

     

    ps. If needed, I can offer a layotu developer to restyle community website. I would need graphics I could give him though, I guess Elgg foundation would have to come up with guidelines or graphics. It would probably be best to do this on Elgg 1.8. ( to clarify: I don't have to be listed anywhere for this...)

     

    If there was some public plan for features we want on community website, I guess from time to time my team could help with them as well. I just wouldn't like to work on something that later is not used.

  • Question is; are 3rd party devs really willing to do development of the community site under the guidance of core devs to bring it up to date?

    Proposal? Well everyone has their own projects of course, so I doubt no one person can take on the direct management of getting community site referbished... why not a system like the following:

    • If you want to get involved volunteer (as developer/tester/project manager)
    • Setup rotating management list through list of volunteers (weekly management role)
    • Build roadmap and delegate to individuals/teams
    • Core devs sign off on raodmap
    • Get started
    • Weekly manager signs off on progress and hands over to next manager to keep things going
    Sounds like we're doing a lot of talking about this...meanwhile we're not making much "combined" progress.
    Thoughts?