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More Elgg 1.5 Tweaks

February 22, 2009 in Elgg, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 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, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 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 buddypress, Elgg, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 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, open source, Social Networking, Wikis | 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, 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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