How about Elgg Change there new elgg Releasing Policy

How about Elgg team do there update in 3 type just like how Linux & Ubutu do there update..

1) LTS releases (Log Term Support Release)

2) New Release (with 6 months or 2 months of support)

3) Beta Release

Now the new releases will be helpful for new elgg users while the LTS will be helpful for Old elgg users. now New release will have frequent update while the LTS just security updates. Now when the LTS has an update it should have the best of the New release say if new release is some where 2.0 the LTS will be at 11.1 so that the Old websites will have a flexible update. I stress that the elgg team consider this so that much of the community get benefited from this. 
 

  • > at least your update numbers should not be confusing people should find it easy to know whether its a security update or new feature update for elgg..

    Look up semantic versioning. That is the standard we follow now for the last year and will follow going forward. Is much simpler than in 1.8 days which is what it sounds like you're used to.

  • A lot has changed since 2009! We only started semantic versioning in 2014. It's way different and upgrades are way smoother. I encourage you to try it out.

    ​Well I just upgraded from a heavily moded 1.5 -> 1.12.1  ... maybe I should have waited until 2.0...

  • I think the new release policy is hurting Elgg very badly. Below stats are from alexa for 2015, strongly indicating Elgg popularity decline.

    It is declining rapidly since Elgg moved to 1.9 and in just a few months dropped support for 1.8, while supporting 1.7 for over 2 years.  

    As a developer it is not interesting to release new versions of your modules every few weeks, just to keep up with core devs in their effort to improve Elgg. I only have around 20 plugins to maintain (10 public), but some devs have over 50 modules. Me personally like to improve my work, not just maintain compatibility.

    Elgg on Alexa

  • i had to code for almost a month non stop to get my site from 1.8 to 1.12 level (and my plugins.. plus locate other plugins from the community and github to replace ones that were no longer supported etc.). the upgrade guide in the docs was helpful - it's just that so much changes over the course of 2+ years, with the various software layers - that it is inevitable that a lot needs to be done. i still have only got my code to a basic level of compatibility - it could certainly be advanced more in some ways.

    therefore, it is not surprise that interest in elgg has dropped, since most people are unhappy to do even a day's coding!

    that said, elgg is not framework that is exactly targeted at 'average users' - it has historically been more used by more dedicated and experienced groups who are interested/capable in investing many hours to produce a usable system.

  • I bet you'd find countless mid-2000 era PHP/MySQL projects with similar dropoffs. There are very good reasons Elgg in particular has fallen: Its default theme was very poorly aged until very recently; it's still a very "web 1.9" product (pages with small bits of Ajax) when users expect everything now; Facebook's domination has convinced many to give up building their own networks; Competitors can offer a much better user experience by being super-opinionated on core features (and willing to break plugins).

    None of those problems I can see us fixing by releasing features much more slowly.

    1.8 came out 4 years ago.

  • @shellcode Upgrade from 1.5 => 1.12? You are awesome and you should feel awesome! Even 1.12 => 2.0 will be much nicer than before. We've really truly tried not to break anything that we didn't have to for the sake of some higher goal. A well-written 1.12 plugin should most Just Work on 2.0. We'd love to hear about anywhere that doesn't hold true.

  • i had to code for almost a month non stop to get my site from 1.8 to 1.12 level

    The question is: how much of that was 1.8 => 1.9 stuff, and how much of it was 1.9 => 1.12 stuff? I'm assuming it's weighted toward the former, but no one has offered enough details to really know.

    Was there anything you *had* to change that wasn't listed in the upgrade instructions?

     

  • @Gerard, Elgg popularity decline or Elgg popularity not increasing may be due to better out-of-box what-millions-of-user-are-accustomed-to-use FEATURE being not available in Elgg, mainly the user input box [hypewall was close but its unavailable and does much less] for example: http://demo.stackideas.com/easysocial

    See

    http://s7.postimg.org/rir676lcb/Fire_Shot_Screen_Capture_217_Nadia_Cruz_Das.png
    Once this is available in-bulit and asap I guarantee Elgg usgae will shoot up like anything. Thanks.

  • there are so many great plugins, which are  lost in the latest release of elgg.  its really painful. to loose them.

    we cant do much on that part. (may be a group of people can take the job of reviewing lost plugins) .

    but at list one thing that can be done is , marking a plugin as broken .

     

     

  • @Steve, you might be right about those reasons and partly explains a dropoff. It is however unlikely that this happened in 2015 and not before. Facebooks domination did not start in 2015, nor is user expectation suddenly extremely higher. 

    You lost 2/3 of your traffic in 2015. I'd be a little more worried if my analysis could be right. Like enRaiser mentions, still lots of plugins are not upgraded and therefore much of the power of Elgg is lost.

    Why would a new users start with Elgg if half (best guestimate) of the plugins do not work on the latest 4 releases ? And those people still on 1.8 need to do huge effort like Urasoul to upgrade. 

    I second the motion to try and get the majority of the plugins, or at least the top 100 to work on 1.12. To facilitate that without taking ownership of a plugin would probably make that more attractive for developers to do. Sort of adopting an orphaned plugin and only take responsibility for the upgrade.

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