Hi all,

my organization is an Elgg user over years now (https://my.advatera.com). We are a community for digital, marketing and communication managers.

The big struggle for me is, that Elgg does not offer a modern and most importantly easy to use UI from scratch. Maybe a clean install with the standard theme is somehow ok, but as you start adding plug-ins that are cruical for the use of Elgg, the user experience gets messy.

It looks just very dated compared to competitors like https://www.humhub.org, https://www.oxwall.com/ (though quite chaotic as well) and others.

Some examples:

• Especially pages like users notification settings are very bad designed. Even here on elgg.org it does not look very user friendly.
• The whole notifications system at all is a complete mystery. Maybe for those who programmed it, it is somehow self explaining. For admins and users it is not. I have no overview of who gets when an email and just somehow making the emails looking good and user friendly is difficult. Clean and clear e-mail notifications is such a important thing to drive engagement.
• It is a mystery for many users if they are now inside a group or at the generall wall (we did some improvements manually)
• Mentioning others (@) does work just partly with plug-ins (on the wall but not on pages or in discussions)
• And so many more things

Often for every other thing you need a plugin that then is not consistent and breaks the already not so good design and user experience.

I do think there is an strategic issue here. If Elgg would have from scratch a very clean, modern, consistent, future proof theme with good options for plugin developers to extend without breaking the ux concept, it would tremendously help. I also think that many who are evaluating social media platforms don't take Elgg simply of the dated look and feel as well as the inconsistency you get if you install plugins.

I would be even happy to invest into a real new clean modern user interface.

Open for thoughts. What do you think?

Cheers, Volker