Would it be possible to backport some of the nicer index-widget features from blog-tools? The different view types etc.

It would also be great if one had an option to only show site news and not the group news in the index widget.

Thanks!

@Krischan "Backport" is maybe not the right term. The Blog Tools plugin is a separate plugin that adds functionality to blogs. The News plugin here is kind of a clone of the bundled Blogs plugins with basically the same code used but renaming of "blogs" to "news" whereever necessary (e.g. subtype and function names) and of course with restricting the ability to make news postings to admins and group owners. The same approach could also be used for creation of a "News Tools" plugin, i.e. taking the code of the blog_tools plugin (which also has a version compatible with Elgg 1.8) and then modify it to deal with "news" entries instead of "blogs" accordingly. If you ask about "me" doing this, I'm afraid I currently don't have the need or time to do it.

An option to restrict posting of news to "site news" only shouldn't be too difficult to handle. I can't say what exactly would have to be modified for implementing such a feature at the moment. I'll keep this suggestion in mind. If I have time I might add such a functionality.