Modifying Elgg v1.7 with v1.8 in mind

Hi Everyone,

I'm very new to Elgg.  I will be commissioning a developer to modify Elgg for our company in the next few weeks and am looking for some advise.

Are there any specific methods in which developers should modify Elgg to ensure that the modifications can easiliy be integrated into new versions of Elgg? How difficult is upgrading?

One development aspect was going to be a plugin to allow all user's to edit own personal themes on their own profiles. I read that v1.8 had enhanced theme stuff coming - can anyone shed any light on exactly what will be developed?

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! 

Cheers, Nick 

  • check out the trunk files for 1.8 @ http://trac.elgg.org/ to get an idea of the look and feel. i'm loving 1.8's features :)

  • Are there any specific methods in which developers should modify Elgg to ensure that the modifications can easiliy be integrated into new versions of Elgg?

    Good SCM and knowledge of it. Keywords for Google (some of) "branches", "merge changesets", "vendor branches"

    How difficult is upgrading?

    "It depends" (c). Not-crossed changes can be moved automagically, in harder cases it may require hand-work. At least for us it wasn't a big problem to update Elgg RE 1.5 into 1.7 directly

    I read that v1.8 had enhanced theme stuff coming

    t will be (AFAIK) only some type of cosmetic changes, without big functional changes - polished HTML, rewritten CSS (names, content in order to be more "cascaded")

  • I've checked out the svn trunk of the new GUI.  It looks really really nice.  Clean, professional, corporate.

    I think it's ideal for use inside a company.

    You can get a preview using:

    svn co http://code.elgg.org/elgg/trunk /your/save/path

    That will also show you the code structure.  

  • Thanks for all your comments guys. Appreciate the input. 

    Nick