What the best Elgg 2.3 or Elgg 3

What the best Elgg 2.3 or Elgg 3 What are the advantages of Elgg 3 and is it worth upgrading from version 2.3 to 3

The patching process is easy and will not lose the location of data

  • The default theme of Elgg 3 has been quite thoroughly rewritten. It should cope better on varying screen resolutions (even if the de-facto default theme of Elgg 2, i.e. the Aalborg theme, was also a responsive theme). It should also be easier to customize the theme (or create a theme) on Elgg 3 as certain config options can be set via CSS variables.

    It should also be easier to get a consistent look throughout the site on Elgg 3 also with 3rd party plugin of these plugins make use of the theming conventions offered by Elgg 3 core. Plugin developers should have less work to do to get their plugins look consistent. Though for existing plugins (for Elgg 2) the developers would not only have to make their plugins compatible with Elgg 3 but they might have to upgrade their code addionally to get rid of some plugin-specific code that was necessary on Elgg 2 to achieve a certain look but might no longer be necessary on Elgg 3.

    Elgg 3 should be better maintainable (code of Elgg core and properly written/upgraded 3rd party plugins). But that's an advantage that will only show up in future (and probably more important for developers). On short term Elgg 3 has less plugins available as not quite a number of plugin have not yet been upgraded (including a number of my plugins - struggling to find the time working on them).

    Elgg 3 uses another DB engine (InnoDB instead of MyISAM). The InnoDB engine should have a better performance because it doesn't require whole table locking but can deal with row locking only. Elgg 3 also supports the utf8mb4 encoding, i.e. better support of some languages and also support for emojis.

    Caching options (like memcached or redis) might work slightly better. Though it might be less noticeable if you just make use of existing plugins while it might make a difference if you try to make use of it as a developer.

    Elgg 3 is the future (with regards to long term support - years to come - even if Elgg 2.3 will still be supported for a while certainly). When to upgrade an existing site to Elgg 3 is most likely a matter of which 3rd party plugins you are using (or when starting a new site NOW you definitely need NOW). If the core functionality of Elgg 3 (and already available plugins) is sufficient, you can give it a try. If you rely on some plugins not yet available for Elgg 3, you can't upgrade just yet obviously. Or you might want to give Elgg 3 just a bit more time to get more stable - nevertheless you could test out Elgg 3 on your own for example in a local test installation to see for yourself the difference betwenn Elgg 2 and 3.