Consolidating duplication

Now that 1.9 has been released, I think we need to step back from new features and start consolidating the developer experience. We have a *lot* of duplication in this project:

  • 2 Change logs
  • 2 build scripts
  • 2 sets of documentation
  • 2 PHP test frameworks (Evan made some promising headway)
  • 2 JS engines
  • 2 class loaders

I know some of this is due to BC, but a lot of this can and should be fixed. I think the biggest offenders are the documentation and JS.

For docs, we don't have much of an excuse to have two of them still, other than we haven't had the time to migrate the old one. It's arguable that we shouldn't have launched the RTD version (even though it's an improvement) if we didn't have a time to properly migrate the existing docs.

For JS, I understand we needed to keep our Elgg JS object in 1.9 for BC, but we should have updated our JS to be AMD compatible. It's confusing for new devs to see us recommend using AMD but that not be reflected in our own code.

I know we're all interested in forward momentum toward 2.0, but we've been putting some of these off for so long that first impressions of Elgg to new devs are not what I think we would all want them to be.

Feedback and Planning

Feedback and Planning

Discussions about the past, present, and future of Elgg and this community site.