The only thing i am really afraid of is Ismayil Hypegallery plugin it's really sad to see him leave & yes he has done so many modern plugins for free which the elgg community need to be thankful..  I really don't know how to switch over to tidypic & get all the hypegallery data be shifted this is going to be the biggest task & i need to find a fund for that bcz i am still finding it difficult in monetizing my website.. The beauty of Elgg is i have never hired any developer to help out my website & the community has done all the help i need to just fix my problem. 

I guess elgg need to change the way the developers can get monetized.. Just a suggestion so that we can get more developers involving in elgg.. 

1) Elgg core community need to pick developers who can access elgg fund raising plugin page where they can fix a minimum amount once attained allow the users to download (Thus elgg policy of free CMS & Plugin in the community does not die & the developer gets an earning).

2) If a new developer enters elgg he needs to provide a no of plugin say keep basic of (5-10) plugin free (that absolutely works well) Then he can request for an access of fund raising plugin which the core community decides on providing the access.

I guess we have discussed on this topic a several times but the core community need to decide on this so the top developers get some earning from elgg & this can give them a boost. 

Some feedback from the Core team:

Theme

The default theme for Elgg 2.x was the Aalborg theme, there was however the possibility to disable this plugin and still have a 'theme'. This meant that we had to maintain 2 sets of HTML/CSS. This is a lot of work.

In Elgg 3.x we choose to drop the additional Aalborg theme, but integrate all the HTML/CSS from that plugin into the base HTML/CSS. This means you get the Aalborg theme look and feel (including responsiveness) in Elgg 3.x.

PHP 8+??

I can't even see anything mentioned on the website about that. But thanks to a lot of work by Ismayil the unittest of Elgg cover a lot more in Elgg 3 than in Elgg 2. So when a new version of PHP is available we'll add it to our automated tests and see what happens.

Elgg 4

There is no timeline yet for Elgg 4, if we follow our own planning this should be 1 year after Elgg 3.0 gets released.

Plugin development

Elgg 3, broke a lot, but also made thins easier for developers. It will take some time for plugins to get updated. If you really want a plugin to get updated quickly contact the plugin developer and see if you can fund (part of) the development of the Elgg 3 version of the plugin. Plugin developers need to eat to ;)