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WPMu & BuddyPress updates

April 30, 2009 in Elgg, buddypress, wordpress | No comments

WPMu was just updated to a long awaited Version 2.7.1 which has, in turn, triggered events in the BuddyPress realm. The new WPMu version offers a number of important improvements making it a significant improvement. As a consequence, BuddyPress has finally been able to release Version 1.o.

Upgrading from WPMu 2.7 to 2.7.1 was a cinch. First make up your files and database , then simply click the upgrade notification and the new files load. Upon upgrading , the first thing you will notice that the horizontal on the top of the admin page has disappeared. The controversial feature is now an optional plugin.

This upgrade goes yet further in polishing and un-cluttering the administrative interface. Plugin management is much improved and can be handled through the backend rather than the prior ftp for mu plugins and the backend for the wp plugins.

I’m going to start from scratch on my WPMu/BuddyPress installation soon and look forward to renewing my BuddyPress and Elgg comparisons.

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Ben Werdmuller leaves Curverider

April 20, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, open source | 7 comments

Elgg co-founder Ben Werdmuller has left Curverider as of April 15.  On his blog he refers to Team Elgg positively calling them, “…a first-class team of brilliantly intelligent, creative peope.” When asked why he left Elgg, he replied, “I’ve got some other ideas I’d like to persue. Nothing sinister.”

Ben intimates that he has some exciting new projects and will have announcements later in the year. In fact Ben sent an interesting Tweet implying that he will have he has much to say when he is back from his travels. Hopefully it will be a hint of things to come.

I wish Ben well and look forward to hearing about his new projects. Additionally, I want to thank him for all the work and inspiration he has provided developing Elgg.

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Elgg 1.5 includes default widgets

March 22, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 8 comments

One feature I didn’t see when testing beta Elgg 1.5 is the admin’s ability to set default widgets in both user profiles and dashboards. These tools, included in the Elgg 1.5 “full” package. Elgg adopters have asked for this feature since the initial release and there have been plugins that provided such functionality, but had to be configured by code.

The new functionality gives admins the ability to place default widgets in one of three columns in a format nearly identical to that the users see when they configure their widgets.

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This feature allows administrators to provide new visitors with configured profiles and dashboards  rather than the blank pages that many thought were confusing and unfriendly to new users.

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Curverider Releases Elgg 1.5 RC2

March 9, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 2 comments

Curverider released a second release candidate for Elgg 1.5 today. It can be downloaded as a tarball from their site, or you can get it from the subversion library. Release Candidate 2 brings about 40 new revisions to Elgg code since the release of the first Release Candidate last week.

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Elgg 1.5 RC released

March 5, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 6 comments

A release candidate for Elgg 1.5 was unvealed by the Curverider team today. Release candidates have been tested and are generally very stable. Nonetheless, Curverider does not recommend its use for production sites.

The core Elgg team has been working feverishly to squash remaining bugs and enhance Elgg’s performance. They have committed over 100 commits to their Subversion repository since Saturday.

I have personally tested earler incarnations of Elgg 1.5 and am glad to report that it works well. I am sure that anybody has worked with earlier versions of Elgg will be pleased with the latest. Stay tuned for another post highlighting more enhancements to the software.

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More Elgg 1.5 Tweaks

February 22, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 10 comments

Elgg 1.5 will bring a number of enhancements large and small that will improve usability for both users and admins. Here are a few more things to look forward to with its impending release.

As Elgg  changed versions, many of the plugins have become incompatible. Developers have had to update them in order to make them work with new incarnations. In some cases, there are various versions of the plugins floating around making things confusing for admins.

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Now you can see if the plugin is compatible from the Tools Administration interface. The plugins displayed above have no versions specified. Plugin developers can now add another tag to their manifest.xml file.

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This value corresponds with the value specified as follows in the version.php file in the Elgg core.

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If the value match up, all is okay.

Another enhancement is the addition of categories. Uploading the Categories plugin to the mod folder and activating gives a Categories option in the Aministrative interface.

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Simply add categories separated by commas and save so that they appear as options when creating content such as blogs.

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While we are viewing the blog interface, you may notice changes beyond the presence of categories in the left column area. You will have the ability to enable or disable comments to blogs posts, as well as, save drafts. In general, throughout the user interface you will notice several enhancements to the left column navigation.

Another new module that users will find useful is members. Members lists all the members of the site and includes their latest post to their wire.

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Note the options in the left hand navigation. Also note the tabs over the main area. You will see this feature appearing in many views within Elgg 1.5.

These represent a grab bag of new enhancements users and admins can look forward to seeing in Elgg 1.5. Stop back for more information in the near future.

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Elgg 1.5: Notifications, external pages, and frontpage

February 21, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 15 comments

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Elgg & BuddyPress: Groups

February 12, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, buddypress, open source | 6 comments

Elgg and BuddyPress are two free and open source social networking platforms. Both allow users to set up and configure groups. While the process of setting up groups and the results appear different, they have many similarities.

Elgg puts all the group configuration options on one page.

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Of note, you may make the group membership Public or Private and set access to Public, Logged in, Private, friends collections, or any other groups. You may enable Pages (the collaborative writing tool), a forum, and a file repository.

BuddyPress, on the other hand, brings you though a number of short steps. In the first step, you are prompted to name and write a description of the group. The second part allows you to configure the group settings.

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Next, you upload a group avatar. The final step is the Invite Friends pane.

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One important distinction between these two platforms are the access and membership control options. With BP one has 3 radio button options appearing on the Group Setting pane. Elgg, on the other hand, is somewhat more granular. Membership may be toggled Public or Private, while you more options for access.

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More options appear if you have made Collections of Friends.

An Elgg group page with no content appears as below. It features a forum, pages for collaborative writing, and a file repository which can also function as a rudimentary gallery. Other features are available depending upon which modules are installed in the Elgg site. The page below is from a site with most of the plugins from the Elgg core developers. If the messageboard mod is enabled, it appears in the groups. Other plugins such as Kevin Jardine’s Event Calendar are also configured to show up in groups. Note that you also have an option to invite friends to the group.

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A basic BuddyPress group is shown below. By default, it features a forum and the wire. I understand there is a gallery in the works, but it has not yet been released as beta along with the other BuddyPress Components. Like Elgg, BuddyPress does have add ons, some of which, I am sure, will impact and augments BP groups.

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If you scratch the surface, BP and Elgg groups are very similar. BP’s Active Forum Topics functions much like Elgg’s Latest Discussion. Elgg’s Messageboard and BP’s Wire appear to function similarly. Both have member lists displaying icons, as wells as, group forums.

The differences include Elgg’s finer granularity of access control. Elgg groups also have more options at the moment with Pages and a file repository. BuddyPress developers plan to release a gallery component in the future. I know that group features in Elgg can be extended through plugins, and I assume the same is true for BuddyPress. Elgg, having been released for several months, appears to have the upper hand in modification options. I would expect to see more BP mods once it has been formally released.

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Elgg devs crack open door on wiki

February 8, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Wikis, open source | No comments

I browsed to the Elgg documentation wiki today and discovered that they have begun to let individuals other than the four core developers contribute. Names other than Ben, Dave, Marcus, and Pete are appearing on the recent changes page.

On the front page of the wiki, developers wrote:

If you are using Elgg and would like to help us with documentation, please get in touch info@elgg.org – as the docs build out to a decent level, we will open up editing to all.

This is a great development. Elgg will benefit from allowing the community to flesh out documentation like many other open source software projects. It is time for comprehensive Elgg documentation for users and administrators,  as well as developers. I look forward to being able to lend a hand.

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Elgg 1.5 appears on track for next month

January 23, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 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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Elgg and BuddyPress compared: new user

January 22, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, buddypress, open source, wordpress | 7 comments

While comparing software features is important, it is also essential to consider user experience. This post is going to focus on the new user experiences for Elgg and BuddyPress working through first look at the site, the registration process, and the resultant page once one has logged in for the first time. I gave an initial overview of the differences between Elgg and BuddyPress in my previous blog post.

With BuddyPress, a visitor arrives a page that may look like this with a “sign up” link on the upper right hand side of the page.

In Elgg, a first time visitor may encounter a page like the one below. Note that the Elgg landing page has been altered using an index.php override. I feel this is a fair comparison in terms of effort with installation. As you may recall from my previous comparison, the BuddyPress installation required a certain amount of coding, so I thought it would be fair to apply comparable effort to an Elgg installation as a starting point. Note the registration link in the left column.

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Registration

Click on the register button with BuddyPress and you arrive at a page asking you to provide profile information by filling out several fields. The administrator can change or add to these fields making them optional or required. In this installation, I added a “Profession” field. Further discussion of this feature will appear in future posts.

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Next, you are given the option to create a blog or just an account.

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You then are notified to look for an activation email. Once you click on the link in the email, you are given a password.

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Elgg, on the other hand, simply asks for a display name, email address, username, and password.

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Click on Register and you are returned to the landing page with a prompt telling you that you will be getting an confirmation email. Clicking on the link in the mail returns you to the site notifying you of confirmation success. You can then log in.

Logging In

Once logged in, Elgg and BuddyPress deliver you to entirely different pages. BuddyPress brings you to your public Profile page, while Elgg delivers you to your private Dashboard.

Once you log into your new BuddyPress Account, you return to the main page with the options available to a logged in user. Note the gray menu bar on the top of the page that was not visible when not logged in.

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The first time you log into Elgg, you arrive at your dashboard page and prompted to click the edit page link highlighted below. The dashboard is visible only to the account owner.

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Once you click that, you are presented with a set of widgets that allow you to customize your dashboard. Simple darg and drop them into one of the three columns. These widgets can also be configured. On a side note, Elgg’s profile pages function much the same.

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Conclusions

BuddyPress’s and Elgg’s landing pages are strikingly different, especially if Elgg’s index.php file is not customized. No question that BuddyPress’s default theme with the widget customization is more attractive out-of-the-box. That being said, this is not very important as one can install different themes on either platform. Elgg has many free themes available and BuddyPress will have a variety of themes upon release. Discussion of this is really best left to another post.

BuddyPress’s registration page solicits much more information than the bare bones Elgg registration page asking the new user to fill in profile information and to upload an avatar before the registration process is complete. It also allows the administrator to customize the fields in the form. This could cut both ways. Some users might be put off by the steps required to register preferring to enter just enough information to get inside. On the other hand, it would be more likely that users actually provide profile information and an avatar. It requires somewhat more of a commitment to get an account. In the Elgg community site, I have found it irritating that many users have no profile information at all because it is not required. They just leave it all blank.

Elgg, delivers you to a blank dashboard page; whereas, BuddyPress delivers you to the logged in front page. Some have argued that the blank dashboard is confusing and univiting. On the other hand, it does invite immediate action to customize your account with an easy to use widget interface. With BuddyPress, you will need to explre the menu to find more options. Both Elgg and WordPress require a certain amount of exploration once logged in as not everything is immediately obvious.

I will continue to post about the features and user experiences in future posts. Hopefully, these posts will help individuals choose the best platform for their needs. Beyond that, perhaps developers can learn by examining the different interfaces.

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Changes in Elgg’s support

January 7, 2009 in Elgg, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 8 comments

The Elgg support community’s access to content has gradually been restored after  large portions of the community site were closed or disabled apparently because of attacks on the core developers. The Elgg Google groups were unaffected other than becoming much busier.

Around the turn of the year, developer Dave Tosh created a group with the intent of discussing improvements to the Elgg community site for developers and end users. The most interesting discussion occurred in the Welcome post.. Subsequently, Dave Tosh has outlined changes to Elgg support:

We have decided to go for a top level elgg.org documentation area that is powered by Mediawiki. This is similar to many open source projects and therefore makes sense as developers are used to it.

At the moment, I am not sure how this is a change. Curverider has used MediaWiki as a vehicle for documentation since the release of Elgg 1.0. MediaWiki has been skinned to look and feel like the rest of the Elgg site which adds unity. Other than that there have been little. Community members still cannot change or add content to the wiki as I am accustomed to in other open source projects.

Groups have been refactored to improve the layout and highlight key groups. I think it is worth sticking with groups for discussion and where there are shortcomings, address them. We have restricted the creation of new groups, but existing groups are still active and owners can now decide if they want forums, page and files as all are optional.

These are positive changes. Highlighting important groups will draw users to where they need to go. It will also discourage the duplication of what is already present. Restricting group creation is also a good idea. This is very similar to how discussion forums operate—the administrator controls the organization of the site. Users generally cannot create a forum.

Integrated google search. We took our cue from Wordpress on this one. Using Google search was the fastest way to get integrated search across the three open source tools we use on the elgg.org site (Mediawiki, Elgg and Trac).

The search function in Elgg has been a serious limitation. An integrated search using Google is a great help. I think it might even be better if it searched the Elgg Goggle Groups as well. I also look forward to seeing this as a plugin.

Plugin authors can now decide if they are going to allow comments on their plugins and shortly there will be basic version control which should help make it easier to follow plugin development.

This appears to have been implemented. Plugin authors can now choose to replace older versions when they upload newer versions. Again, this is a positive development. I wonder though, if some implementation could be created that allow users to keep older version available as they may be compatible with older versions of Elgg. [Edit: Cash Costello reports that this is the case.]

An open source project becomes a diverse community of developers and users with vastly different interests and needs. People have varying abilities and skills.  I believe that many constituents may be best served by employing a bottoms up model in which they can become active contributors to a knowledge base. Both FaceBook and WordPress allow individuals to create accounts and edit content on their MediaWiki documentation.

I appreciate Curverider’s moves to improve support for the Elgg community. We are all indebted to the developers (core and otherwise) for all their hard work in making Elgg what it is and sharing it with the world. An open repository for shared knowledge would would enhance Elgg’s success. I’ve enjoyed working with Elgg and look forward to working with it to put together a great K12 social networking platform.

I invite your thoughts on the matter.

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