thanks a lot to all the coders who worked to get elgg up to 2.x and beyond. all the way from 1.7 to 1.12 i was finding that my site was way too slow and that people just didn't want to stay using it... even after doing quite a lot of optimisations on the server, in the plugins and so on.. it was still too slow. with the combination of elgg 1.2.1 and PHP7 i am finding that the site is much more usable and much more fun. others are coming and using the site a bit more regularly and i am more relaxed about it all.

i needed to code solidly for between 3-4 weeks to get all of my own plugins upgraded to 2.1.x level (particularly my custom theme plugin) and i haven't even done any 'fancy' stuff like convert the code to classes or use composer / packagist. so what i am saying here is that the upgrade process is not a quick / easy one if you have plugins to upgrade and have over-ridden a lot of the core elgg views / pages. however, the result is well worth it and my plugins/theme are generally getting lighter as new functions in elgg core make tasks easier to achieve and some of the features i was adding to my site are now in core anyway.

as a rough figure, most of the pages of my site now load in around 50% of the time they did previously, which is great!