Nightly builds of Elgg 1.8 are available at http://elgg.org/download.php (lower right corner, trunk directory).

You need to get an svn client (like Tortoise which also has a Firefox extension) and point it at http://code.elgg.org/elgg/trunk then you can browse the code - 1.8 is in the elgg > branch area

1.8 is a TRUNK. There aren't full 1.8 branches for now

As Alexander said, the development for 1.8 is happening in trunk. 1.7 is a branch. There have not been any beta releases of 1.8. 1.7.2 will be released next week. Those who want to follow the development of 1.8 can grab the latest using a svn client or download a nightly as described above.

Cash, are you saying that Elgg 1.7.2 stable will be released this week? When you made the statement, it was last week. So, I am replying within the "next week" right now. So, we should expect 1.7.2 stable in a day or two? I hope so! Thanks.

There was a bug discovered in one of the upgrade scripts late last week. I fixed it yesterday. That should have been the last thing standing in the way of the 1.7.2 release.

what about plugins and 1.7.2 will they all fit together ? 

what about plugins and 1.8 ? 

when do you expect to have a beta of 1.8 ? this year?

will there changes be made to the theme-part of elgg in 1.8? Is there anything writen about that ?

I'm currently working on a project which should be running end of this year. Therefore we develop a theme and I really would like to have it work in 1.8.

Good questions, idiotter. Answers to these questions would be helpful at this time too.

Cash, I would also ask, do you think it is at all a good idea to be using 1.8 yet, on live sites? I saw someone else saying that they are doing this for their customers right now. While we all probably wish that 1.8 stable was out right now, I can't imagine it being wise to be using basically Trunk in production. What do you think?

• Plugins that work on 1.7.0 and 1.7.1 will working with 1.7.2 (The only significant changes since 1.5 for plugin compatibility has been a jQuery upgrade and the action token requirement for better security)
• 1.8 is still up in the air. A lot of the core views are being rewritten and that may affect some plugins.
• I'd expect a beta of 1.8 late this year
• One of Elgg's biggest weaknesses has been its HTML markup and this has been undergoing some significant changes. It should be much easier to theme Elgg starting in 1.8. Nothing has been written about this as it's still a work in progress.
• It should be possible to grab some of the views from 1.8 and use them to build a theme that works in 1.7 and 1.8. I haven't tried to do this.
• I would not use what is in svn trunk (1.8) for a production site yet for 2 reasons: 1) there are still a lot of bugs that have been introduced in trunk while 1.7.2 will be the most stable version of Elgg ever  2) Things will be changing a lot and it will be a lot of work keeping up with it ... plus the potential for some really serious issues because it is a development version after all.