improving the elgg.org community with quick wins

following on from the recent thread here about the future of elgg, i thought to share some of the thoughts about the community here that have been in my mind since the first time i used it (back when elgg 1.7.4 was fresh).

i have always found it strange that elgg is a modular social network platform and yet it's own community makes use of the bare minimum of modules! i don't know why that is, but i have some suggestions that may really help increase the interactions on elgg.org and thus help make elgg itself stronger:

  • if we want to choose a new theme for elgg (as discussed) then it would be great to be able to have a community vote on what is thought to be the best currently available. since we have a polling plugin already, that sounds like it should be easy to do and will generally improve the sense of community here in the long run.
  • on the same note: the summary view of themes in the plugin repository are lacking thumbnails which makes browsing themes way more difficult than it should be. adding that would be a 5 minute job.
  • along with the polls, it would probably be pretty easy to add the 5 star ranking plugin to the plugin/theme lists - which might provide a good way for people to give feedback and adds an extra dimension to the community.
  • maybe adding hypelists/interactions would give the site a quick boost too and would allow for feedback to be gained in advance of adding them to elgg core - if that is what is intended.

any thoughts on that?

Feedback and Planning

Feedback and Planning

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