Elgg 1.5 appears on track for next month

January 23, 2009 in Elgg, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 10 comments

Elgg 1.5 is slated for release next month. From the looks of things, it appears that they may well be on time. Curverider devs have made almost 100 revisions (at the time of this writing) to the SVN repository since the beginning of this month.

Indeed, Marcus Povey, who seems to do much of the day to day coding, recently tweeted:

Assessing work priorities for the following few weeks before the 1.5 release of Elgg

He also intimated:

Stuff on the roadmap + bugfixes. Some new functionality – much already in SVN. Complete list to come

Speaking of Roadmap, there seems to have been some revisions to the 1.5 planned features:

  1. Views and plugin location caching
  2. Scalability enhancements – phase one completed. (this is ongoing)
  3. OpenDD import and export – Completed
  4. Improvements to the submenu system including better grouping and naming
  5. Improved frontpage layout
  6. Views and languages files to be loaded on demand rather than discovered on initialisation
  7. Metastring garbage collection – Completed
  8. Group deletion
  9. Site wide activity stream – Completed
  10. Log rotation – Completed
  11. Admin interface for profile field creation – Completed
  12. Rebuild js toolbar menu to be cross-browser compatible – Completed

It also appears that existing themes will need to be updated to be compatible with the new Elgg version.

Now that Elgg 1.5′s release is quickly approaching, I look forward to seeing the next roadmap revision. Elgg developers plan a 6 month major release cycle which means we might expect version in August 2009, one year after the release of Elgg 1.0. As I examine BuddyPress more closely, I’m starting to develop a wish list of new features. What would you like to see after Elgg 1.5?

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10 comments

  1. Matt Leifer’s avatar

    Matt Leifer on January 23, 2009 at 1:51 pm

    No. 1 on my wishlist is more wiki-like functionality for the Pages module, including:

    - Ability to revert to previous version of a Page in addition to just viewing previous versions.
    - MediaWiki-style discussion pages for each Page.
    - Ability to compare differences between revisions of a Page.
    - Ability for individuals to have pages as well as groups.
    - Markdown support.

    As you can imagine, I’m using Pages quite a lot on my site and am quickly realizing its limitations. However, the fine-grained access controls are still worth sacrificing some advanced wiki features for. I may end up coding some of this functionality myself via plugins.

    1. Steve’s avatar

      Steve on January 23, 2009 at 3:47 pm

      Matt-

      Indeed, a wiki version of pages would be fantastic. That was the first thing I thought of when I started playing with pages.

  2. Jonathan Kemp’s avatar

    Jonathan Kemp on January 23, 2009 at 3:12 pm

    Here is my wishlist.

    http://kempwire.com/elgg/elgg-development-wishlist.html

    My number one request is for Elgg to implement Search Engine Optimization. At the least, Elgg needs unique title tags for pages, blog posts and files. This is a basic principle that has been overlooked.

    My second request is for an 0.9-1.x upgrade path. Is that what they mean by “OpenDD import and export – Completed?”

    1. Steve’s avatar

      Steve on January 23, 2009 at 3:57 pm

      I would think the upgrade path would be in the offing soon. It was originally on the 1.5 roadmap. I do know that they were planning to use OpenDD as a path for upgrading. I can’t say whether or not that is still the case.

  3. David Moon’s avatar

    David Moon on January 29, 2009 at 12:57 am

    Well, I’m back. After taking some time to compare Buddypress with Elgg, I’m moving forward with Elgg. Now it’s just a matter of remembering everything I tried to figure out before that it would not do.

    1. Steve’s avatar

      Steve on January 29, 2009 at 10:05 am

      Neither is perfect and they both have a long way to go in my opinion, but I guess that depends on what you want to do.

      I’m going to keep my eye on both. I think that Elgg has the advantage of being designed from the ground up as a social networking platform. BuddyPress has the advantage of being part of the WordPress constellation.

  4. David Moon’s avatar

    David Moon on January 29, 2009 at 10:53 am

    Agreed – two different animals that both have great benefits and promise. Elgg to me is a more intimate, social experience like facebook. Buddypress is more like open and busy like MySpace.

    1. Tradenet’s avatar

      Tradenet on January 29, 2009 at 11:35 am

      And a bit “dizzy” as well.

  5. Ugo’s avatar

    Ugo on February 5, 2009 at 12:50 pm

    Steve,
    I agree on most points you make. I’ve tried them both, and decided to go for Elgg for a project I’m working on. However, I think Elgg can learn a few things already implemented in Buddypress:

    - private messaging to more than one user at a time (I don’t see this in the roadmap, and no one replied to me about this when I submitted a comment on this in the elgg users google group)

    - make it easy to customize the homepage with widgets

    I think Elgg has lots of potential, but it certainly still has a long way to go

    1. Steve’s avatar

      Steve on February 5, 2009 at 5:00 pm

      I think highlighting the differences could foster demand for new features in each. A widgetized homepage would make it easier, but I would like to have other options as well.

      I’ve been posting articles comparing and contrasting various aspects of the two and I plan to do more.

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