The Curverider team continues to update Elgg at a furious pace with nearly 360 commits since early January. It appears Elgg 1.5 will arrive as promised this month. I’ve been watching the progress unfold with an SVN trunk installation (NOT recommended for production!). I have also been given a preview of Elgg 1.5. If I were to try to cover all the changes that I have observed, I’d never get this post out, so I’ll focus on notifications, external pages and the frontpage.
One of the promised improvements on the Elgg 1.5 roadmap is “Notification hooks and delivery.” This change has probably been lurking under my nose for a little while, because I haven’t been checking into the Settings much lately. When I did, I saw some new options.
We now see options for configure tools, notifications, and group notification. Configure tools will give users an interface to configure extensions added by admins. Click on notifications and you get a number of options.
You now have a variety of options for email notifications when actions are performed on your content, the content of friends, or any collections of friends. In addition, the Group Notification allows you to make similar settings on notifications regarding any groups you belong to. Note all the white space to the right of email notification icons. There appear to be more options on the way.
There is still more space. What else could be coming?
Next is an unexpected little gem, External Pages. Curverider has long had About, TOS, and Privacy links on their site’s footer–something users have long wanted. They have delivered with an External Pages plugin. Once enabled, the links appear in the site’s footer as does an External pages option in the left side menu in the Administrative interface.
Note the tabs highlighted above. Click on any of these and you have a convenient text editor to add whatever content you need to any of these pages. Not mentioned is the Front page panel. That puzzled me briefly until I installed the Custom Index plugin.The two fields allow you to enter text into the right and left hand panes without delving into source code.
I imagine this external page editor could be applied to any number of other uses in Elgg in the future.
This is a round up of a few of the many enhancements we can look forward to with the release of Elgg 1.5. There are, of course, many more, and I hope to have more posts outlining new features in the near term.
CommentPress
February 24, 2009 in open source, Social Networking, Technology, wordpress | 5 comments
I recently came across CommentPress. It’s a WordPress plugin that allows readers to comment on a post paragraph by paragraph. CommentPress looks like a very promising collaboration tool. CommentPress is on the cusp of a major upgrade from version 1.4.1 to 2.0. We will look at features in the current version, and preview Version 2.0.
Currently, CommentPress is a WP theme. Install it and activate it.
The resultant main page includes a table of contents on the left side, a “page” that you can customize in the center, and some widgets on the right. The meat of this comes when you clink a link to one of the posts.
Each paragraph has a “speech bubble” to the right of it. Click on that and you can view all the other comments on that paragraph. Comments can even be threaded. Whether or not there are comments already, there is a text field for entering comments.
As it stands, CommentPress works well. Yet the developers plan on giving it even greater flexibility with version 2.0 due out in a couple weeks. I had trouble with the beta on my server, so I can only write about what I have seen and read on their site.
Rather than just a theme, the new version will include 3 plugins and a theme that can work independently so you only use the components you need. You will be able to use it with most WordPress themes. The comment box can be dragged and dropped to any location on the page. There are also enhancements that improve CommentPress’s ability to work with changed text in the posts. I also understand that it will be more flexible in working with other widgets and plugins.
CommentPress’s potential in education and in other areas is great. The ability to annotate and critique text paragraph by paragraph make it much easier to focus a response to a given segment of text. It would work well for peer editing of student writing. Teachers could post a segment of text for students to read allowing them to respond to the text and other comments. I have installed CommentPress to facilitate discussion of our school’s web publishing policy.
I look forward to working with a new version of CommentPress, but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it as it is today. As a bonus, the current version works with WPMU, and I hope the newer version will as well.
Tags: collaboration, commentpress, comments, wordpress, WPMU