Elgg needs to fork now!

What is the wide world of sports is going on with Elgg at this point? 1.8 has obviously been a major platform upgrade with tons of new energy, new users, new techonolgies and new plugins. Please Elgg meisters, fork 1.8 from previous versions by dumping this useless, dog slow site and starting a new theme'd site somehwere else, say elgg18.org or whatever. Is keeping this here network up a secret I am missing in scaring people away? Sometimes I feel like it's a big secret, just don't laugh at the community site, there is great things to be had there.

Then I realize, I don't think it is a big secret, I just think the main team needs to face what's right in front of them....keep this site up and let members use it for their 1.7 systems, what have you, but start a new site on a new URL if needed. START A NEW ELGG COMMUNITY THIS PLACE IS LOOKING LIKE A SOVIET UNION ERA COMPUTER SCIENCE EXPERIMENT!!

Catch my drift? Port to a new community. Let Ismayil and Vazco and the guys who have all put alot into the system help theme the site and put some cool plugins into the core as well when you do, it will take like 15 minutes. This place is a morgue....

  • And I would suggest to let each plugin be released inside a group, so that it may be discussed and played with in the group environment with discussions, cloud files, etc. Any major discussion, like a plugin, should be managed in a group WITH A GROUP RIVER (BITES HAND!).

  • @Billie: I have noticed that.. you are very good ! at volunteering ;-O other peoples' time for various projects ;-)

  • The "fork" you're talking about is discontinuing support for the legacy version of Elgg and moving forward with 1.8 only. This won't happen. The previous dev team made the decision to do something similar with Elgg 0.9.X and 1.0 and it reasonably made Elgg users upset that their Elgg 0.9.X installations were suddenly made obsolete without an upgrade path. I've said it many times that I will not allow that for Elgg. We're not forking the code or the community.

    Instead of suggesting other people spend time improving things, ask yourself what you can do to improve things. All of the code used on this site is available in our Github repo. Patches are most definitely welcome.

  • I have sponsored plugins offered them back to the community. I will continue to do that and hope it helps. Brett, come on, this site is killing everyone. Why not have two sites, one that is redesigned and starts all new content showcasing the 1.8 improvements and design and then have this one to continue legacy support. I can't even get the pages to load here half the time and I give up. Seriously-forest for the trees here man-something had to change to. Again, I don;t suggest you stop legacy support but at some point you are just holding the "greater good" back. I am on all yours side, but when page loads take 30 seconds here and the design is truly dated to put it nicely, why not have two sites?

  • @Dhrup time? Come on, you could have a new designed site in 15 minutes!! Maybe it will even run faster with a 1.8 only install....I can only dream!

  • I think "fork" is maybe used here in a wrong context. As I understand TahoeBilly he is not suggesting to fork Elgg but asking why the community site is still running in Elgg 1.7 and suggesting a second site running in Elgg 1.8. As long as this site would be a "demo" site I can see that this might have some reason. I think there even was a demo site maintained in the past already but it's no longer available (am I right?).

    As for creating a new site running in Elgg 1.8 that contains the plugin repository and all the support groups I would say: "Forget it!" Why:

    • I guess the only reason why the community site is not yet running in Elgg 1.8 is simply that the plugins used (mainly the plugin repository plugin) are not yet ported to Elgg 1.8. If you want to create a new site you would have exactly the same problem...
    • Splitting the community base is not wise. There already are not that many people actively developing Elgg, its plugins and supporting the community in one way or other. Why split the base of developers and the userbase?
    • The reason why the community site is slow is surely not due to Elgg 1.7. The speed is okay most of the time. When it's not it's rather due to some server glitches or maybe due to high traffic. But switching to Elgg 1.8 wouldn't change that in the slightest.
  • @Billy -- don't be a hero ! At least you got your grammar and the (quantum) singularity correct lolz ;-)

    @Other interested Partiez -- Only Brett, Cash coding @Elgg core mainstream, smattering of indep. Devs contributing on side.. whaddya expecx ?

    A 'Demo' would ideally only 'showcase' the current Elgg version, core Plugins, maybe the upgraded PlugIns.

    Maybe I might - install 1.8.3 @ e1083.hackersgalaxy.com but.. will it really serve a practical purpose apart from feeding the hoi-polloi & riff-raff ?

     

  • @iionly Thanks for the conscise thoughts. I realize I am stirring the pot and don't really know much about the decisions involved in an updated site. I do find it a little disconcerting that a "new 1.8" site would "for sure" be as slow as this one. What's the deal? Are we all investing in an open source platform that is going to run slow with heavy usage no matter what? Seriously? Wow! I never factored that in. I then wish us all luck when/if we get a really successful site up and running, and to be honest, that is my main concern over all this and it's come up before, if the community site crawls, what are we looking forward to?

  • @Billy: what I tried to say was that I don't think Elgg (1.7, 1.8 or whatever) is the main factor (maybe even the least important influence) for the intermittent performance issues here at the community site. At least for me the speed of the site here is very good most of the time. For the last few days I noticed a slowness, too, but I suspect this resulted most likely due to some server glitches or maybe some server maintenance (right now it seems okay again).

    With a growing site you need also some hardware that is capable enough to handle the traffic - regardless of whatever social network framework you use. But even when the server hardware is more than powerful enough to handle the number of users easily there can always occur a situation where you might notice a performance loss. Heck, even at Facebook and Twitter there had been days where nothing worked at all for me.

  • Maybe Brett could consider taking the time to do the "Ben Franklin balance sheet" which some say makes a decision much more obvious.

    http://cclayton.wrytestuff.com/swa466201.htm