Is ELGG a dead project

Went looking for theme to use for a client and non will work via download and seeing non have been updated for 10 years. Is the community dead?

  • The current version of Elgg doesn't need themes. These are individual cases for each developer.
    Modern Elgg is an API build for creating custom applications.

    And yes, Elgg and community are still active, - just look at our Telegram channel to be sure

    Read this reply also.

  • The current version of Elgg doesn't need themes.

    I wouldn't say that. The point is: themeing is highly individual. And the themes developed for Elgg 2.x or older won't work anymore on Elgg 3.x or newer. Main reason for that is that it got somewhat easier to customize some aspect of the look of Elgg sites. But this came with a loss of backward compatibility of themes.

    In the end, theme plugins are not much different from other Elgg plugins. Maybe even easier to some extent because they would rather change only existing aspects of Elggs, i.e. the look, and not add functionality. It's mainly a matter of "overriding" already existing views of Elgg where you would modify for example CSS stuff in the views of your "theme plugin". One point that made customization easier on Elgg 3.x and 4.x is that CSS variables were introduced that you could alter via a plugin hook (so it got a little bit like coding in this point but you can change for example the color scheme easier this way in one place instead of having to alter possible several CSS files). See https://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/guides/themes.html for a introduction to theming. It would require some basic knowledge about how to create a simple Elgg plugin but you would be able to create you very own individual theme without the need to hire a developer to write a singular theme just for you (which might not be that cheap compared to other kind of plugins the developer might be able to divide the costs between several customers who have similar requirements).