Elgg

After over a year of development and more than 800 tickets closed, we're pleased to announce the availability of Elgg 1.8.0! In addition to fixing bugs, in Elgg 1.8.0 we focused on improving the end-user experience and making it easier for Elgg ... [More] developers to build Elgg sites. Some of the end-user features include: An easier, more robust installation. The installation is now simpler and provides more guidance throughout the installation process. It also checks for common server misconfigurations and other problems new users often encounter, offering suggestions on how to correct them. A new, more consistent default theme. The new theme is easier to use, standards compliant, and easier to customize. UI element patterns have been consolidated to ensure that the UI is consistent across the site and plugins. A redesigned administration section. The administration section has been redesigned from the ground up with usability in mind. Further, the admin theme has been separated from the site default theme, so problematic plugins should no longer break the admin area. Sticky forms and renewing security tokens. No longer will forms lose data because of expired security tokens. Also, if there's a problem while saving, the form's content will not be lost and will be displayed for the user to try saving again if the developer uses sticky forms. In addition to the user-facing changes, Elgg 1.8.0 also includes many features for developers, including: Standards compliant markup and improved CSS. The default theme includes simplified markup and CSS that make theming a breeze. We've adopted an OOCSS approach to theming that provides simple flexibility compared to previous versions of Elgg. PHP helper functions allow developers to easily build consistent Elgg pages. A new menu system. 1.8.0 includes a new menu system that addresses multiple problems and limitations in previous versions of Elgg. A new JavaScript engine. A dedicated JS engine means you can easily add ajax and advanced features to your Elgg site. The JS engine mimics parts of the PHP engine, so it should feel comfortable for those familiar with Elgg. A new plugin system. The new plugins system allows plugin authors to provide additional information in plugins like priority and dependency requirements to prevent common problems many users experience when installing plugins. Standardized API. With 1.8.0 we have standardized the API that we introduced in 1.7.0. Most functions now accept an options array instead of numerous arguments. No more counting 15 arguments for a single function call! More robust river, metadata, and annotation API. The getter functions for these system have been brought up to the 1.7 API standards and include many fixes and additional options. Better documentation and consistent coding style. The core and bundled plugins are now well documented and follow the same coding style. This makes development in core easier, and allows new developers to look to the bundled plugins as examples of well-written Elgg plugins. There are many additional improvements, bug fixes, and new features in Elgg 1.8.0, but it's impossible to list them all. Because of the many changes, the upgrade from 1.7 to 1.8.0 requires additional steps. Be sure to read the UPGRADE.txt file. Please be aware that many plugins have not yet been updated to work with Elgg 1.8.0, so if you rely on 3rd party plugins, check for the availability of Elgg 1.8.0 versions. Because of the delay of the availbility of third party plugins for Elgg 1.8, the Elgg 1.7 branch will continue to be updated for the next few months while plugin authors migrate to Elgg 1.8.0. No new features will be added to Elgg 1.7, but bugs and security issues will be fixed. We encourage everyone to install Elgg 1.8.0 to experience the improvements mentioned in this post. As always, before you upgrade be sure to make a full backup. If you're ready to take the plunge, grab the latest download, read the installation instructions, and give it a go! Be sure to report any bugs to Trac, and we'd love to hear your feedback at the Community Site. Edit: Elgg 1.8.0.1 was released immediately after 1.8.0 to correct an overlooked bug in the installation system. There are no changes between 1.8.0 and 1.8.0.1 except that. [Less]

Elgg 1.7.11 has been released with security improvements. All users are advised to upgrade immediately. The following security enhancements were made: * Aung Khant from the YEHG reported and helped to fix a XSS vector in the Embed plugin and an SQL ... [More] exposure vector in the Search plugin. * Lostmon Lords reported and helped to fix an SQL injection vector in the search plugin. Tons of thanks to these two people, who have been helping us find and fix security problems for the last few releases! 1.7.11 also includes a few minor bugfixes: * Filtering by content works again in the activity stream. * Dragging works in IE 9 for profile widgets. Again, uses are encouraged to upgrade to Elgg 1.7.11 ASAP to keep their networks and users safe. [Less]

Elgg 1.8.0 beta 2 has been released to address issues found in the first beta. Thanks to everyone who submitted bugs, made pull requests, or gave other feedback during the first beta! 1.8.0 is the next version of Elgg and includes significant updates ... [More] to the API and the UI. Developers and end users are encouraged to try the beta to provide feedback and bug reports, but please note that this release is beta quality software that should not be in production. Changes in the second beta include: Numerous UI bugfixes. Numerous admin area and plugin management improvements. Developer's plugin improvements. Numerous PHP Warnings corrected. Language string corrections and additions. Deprecated function use removed. Code cleanup. Dashboard is now a plugin. Embed plugin now works. Improvements to river views. Improvements to the menu system. Additional documentation added. Fixed problems some users experienced when upgrading from 1.7.X to 1.8.0. Again, the core team wants to thank everyone who helped with the first beta. Since moving to GitHub we've had a tremendous increase of developer contributions, which helps us to more quickly improve Elgg. Grab a copy of 1.8.0 beta2 and let us know about any bugs you find or other feedback you have! [Less]

Elgg developers probably noticed that our trac and code sites were offline this Thursday and Friday. We took these services down to make one of the biggest transitions in Elgg’s development history: migrating our code repositories from SVN to GitHub. ... [More] In addition to changing VCSs, we also moved the sites to the Oregon State University’s Open Source Labs, who donate hosting services to Elgg and a number of other OSS communities. SVN served Elgg well for over 5 years, however the core team unanimously prefers Git as a distributed revision control system, so we decided to migrate to GitHub. As Elgg continues to grow as an open source project, GitHub’s features make it extremely easy for others to contribute to Elgg’s development and to see those contributions merged into the official source code quickly. Though we’ve switched to GitHub for our code, we’re still using trac for our issue tracker. Please continue to post bugs to trac. The switch to GitHub meant some major changes to our trac and code repositories, including full rebasing of the SVN commits to separate repositories on GitHub, additional trac plugins for Git integration and SVN to Git changeset support, and a trac database rewrite for old SVN changesets. We think we’ve ironed out the biggest bugs, but if you encounter anything strange, please contact me at brett [at] elgg [dot] org with details. I also plan to make post about how we migrated our SVN and trac instances to GitHub for those of you interested in the gritty technical details. These changes will help to merge bugfixes from contributing developers into the source code more easily and quickly than the previous system. If you want to get involved with Elgg’s development, check out the great Elgg-specific guide that Evan submitted and be sure to read the GitHub documentation itself, which is also very useful. If you’re a novice with Git, take a crashcourse to understand all the features and benefits. If you haven’t contributed to Elgg yet, why not pick a ticket, fork the code, and start squashing bugs! [Less]

Elgg 1.7.10 has been released to address multiple security issues in all previous versions of Elgg. Admins should upgrade immediately to keep their networks and users safe. Aung Khant from the YGN Ethical Hacker Group discovered multiple reflected ... [More] cross site scripting vulnerabilities in bundled plugins and provided details so we could get a fix out quickly. Thanks again to Aung and the YGN Ethical Hacker Group! Elgg 1.7.10 also contains a few enhancements, bugfixes, and API changes. Enhancements: Banned users are more apparent in user lists and profiles. Bugfixes: TinyMCE: Using Elgg's default font to prevent small font sizes. Files: Optimizations to allow uploading and downloading larger files. Fixed bugs preventing users from adding and removing friends in Friends Collections. $CONFIG->lastcache is correctly set for pages that regenerate the cache. API changes: Added can_edit_access_collection(). Access collection functions no longer check permissions. Do this in actions instead. [Less]

Hello Elgg Community!I am a last year undergraduate student of Computer Science at University of Córdoba. University of Córdoba is located in Córdoba which is a small city but is lovely and beautiful. I have been participating and promoting Free ... [More] Software since 2006 in the University through Aula de Software Libre, a space where students can learn together and share with others.I will develop with the aid of Pablo Martin a project called Multilingual Elgg, which aims to transform Elgg in a platform capable of handling content in different languages, and to try to get us closer since the falling of the Babel tower. I am very excited about the summer of code and about this opportunity to collaborate with this project and with this community. From my point of view Elgg is one of the most interesting projects right now because it lets people build their owns social platforms making us less dependent on big companies in the new paradigm called social media.Multilanguage is important because in the era of social communication, where we are all connected we need applications that let people communicate each others with totally autonomy. Social translating is one of the first needs. In order to make it easier for communities to organize themselves.  Because in the world there are so many different languages we need to facilitate cooperation . One example, in Spain there are at least four different languages, Galician, Vasque, Catalonian and Spanish, just in one country. Every one wants to express themselves in their own.Creating a platform that lets people write their posts in different languages multiply the power of communication of a network and this is one of the main goals of social media.Let's work and cooperate all together, and all the year can be summer.Let’s begin! or better, let’s continue! [Less]

The latest stable version of Elgg has been updated to 1.7.9. This is relatively small release to address a mild security issue and bugs in Elgg 1.7.8. All users are encouraged to upgrade immediately. The security enhancement resolves a rare situation ... [More] in which a page that should be displayed only to logged in or admin users is be exposed when output is sent prematurely. Thanks to Vazco for submitting the report and for debugging the issue! Other changes include: Admins can delete Pages again. TinyMCE upgraded to 3.4.2 to fix IE support. Autocomplete input works correctly. Fixed Message Board "all" posts. Fixed deleting internal messages on some non-English sites. Better feedback if an error occurs when saving widgets. Messages from deleted users no longer show the recipient's avatar. Https logins on fully https sites work correctly. Developers will be interested in the following changes to the API: Added "creating", "river" plugin hook. User metadata is registered as independent higher in the boot sequence. Group ACLs are updated correctly when joining a non-logged in user to a group. Can return 0 for plugin hook 'comments', 'count'. Elgg 1.7.9 is the current stable release. All networks should be running this version of Elgg. [Less]

Hi, I am Saket Saurabh (Tachyon), a final year undergraduate student of Computer Science and Engineering at Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University. Banaras Hindu University is located in Varanasi, India and is the largest residential ... [More] university in Asia. I love writing codes and building applications that can ease the lives of people. I was introduced to open source about three years back and was surprised to see the huge open source community behind it. I really admire the idea of community driven development and how anyone from anywhere can contribute. I am passionate about web development. The idea that we can reach millions of people via the Internet fascinates me. I use PHP and JavaScript for most of my development, but I am also comfortable with C/C++ and Java. I have hosted a few of my projects at Github. When I am not writing codes to change the world, I like to listen to music and play computer games (I dreamt to be pro Counter-Strike 1.6 player a while ago ;) ). Travel and food are my other passions. I also love designing websites and posters. As a web enthusiast I have always been fascinated by the power of social networking. And I was really excited by the idea of a social networking platform. Since Elgg is a prominent social networking engine, I was attracted towards it. I have written two plugins for Elgg which are hosted at the Elgg community plugin repository. Spell Checker is a plugin which adds a spell checking to all user input textarea in any Elgg website. Math Captcha is an alternative to existing Captcha plugins. It asks simple mathematical questions from potential users. I am glad that my proposal Social Web Services and Client was selected for GSoC 2011. I am thankful to Elgg community for giving me this opportunity, especially to Cash Costello, Brett Profit and Evan Winslow. They were very helpful throughout the application process. In this project we aim to implement a set of web services methods using Elgg's API which can be used by developer’s to integrate their software with Elgg’s framework. This will attract developers to create web/desktop applications with rich user experience along with integrations with third-party web applications. We also want to develop a client application, preferably a mobile application that demonstrates how to use these web services. I look forward to interacting with the Elgg community throughout the project. Watch for a discussion post on this in the community forums soon. I am seeking input on what are the most important features that the Elgg community would like to see implemented. I am very excited about the project and am looking ahead for a wonderful summer. [Less]

This May I had the opportunity to attend ElggCamp Santiago. Thanks to the hard work from the Condiminds team and the financial assistance from all the sponsors, the event was an amazing success. Lucila Campos from Condiminds writes in with a ... [More] followup for those who weren't able to attend in person: Hi Everybody! We just wanted to let you know ElggCamp Santiago was more than a success, it was AMAZING!!! Brett Profitt along with the Condiminds team travelled to Chile's capital city, Santiago, a city full of entrepreneurship opportunities, in order to present Elgg as the powerful social engine it is. The one-week-long journey started at the Start Up Chile's meetup on Thursday 5 of May, where a group of about 30 people had the opportunity to have an closer meeting with the ElggCamp Santiago organization. Sadly Brett couldn't make it as he lost his Atlanta flight due to some problems at his local airport; but he sent some awesome videos (you can see here)  and had a live participation through Skype. You can see some images of the Start Up Chile event here. The following days the team decided to visit a some places near Santiago, so we rented two cars and traveled to Viña del Mar and Valparaiso... there are some pics here if you want to take a look to us doing.. nothing! ;) Finally, the day arrived!! On Wednesday 11th at 13.00 hs the ElggCamp > for Developers! started! This was a really great gathering where around 25 developers had the chance to meet Elgg's tech lead, Brett, and learn from his knowledge how to code on Elgg. You can take a look at the presentation he gave and the plugin they coded together on the coding session afterwords here. At 18.30 hs almost 180 people were eating mexican food and drinking beer while waiting to be part of the official ElggCamp Santiago. That really rocked! The event started with a dynamic presentation from part of the Condiminds team, where the audience got to know how Elgg can be turned into a social platform for almost every use they could imagine. After the Condiminds presentation, and on one of the greatest moments of the evening, Brett introduced Elgg 1.8 to everyone but with an incredible twist: He actually launched Elgg 1.8 beta1 LIVE from the stage! Suddenly Elgg 1.8 beta 1 was at the Elgg.org homepage, posted on the blog, tweeted... Amazing moment! After his presentation two Agile experts take the stage to introduce everyone on the audience on the amazing benefits of  software development using the Agile methodologies. They were both intelligent and funny, a great way to learn new stuff! Take a look at their presentation here. Finally, 5 tech entrepreneurs from different part's of the word (Chile, Colombia, España) shared they experiences on the Entrepreneurship Forum. The audience had a great time learning from their success and also from their mistakes! Questions from the public where the closure to this moment, and some of them really took advantage of it! We are more than thankful for the support we received on this foreign country where Elgg is now a passion to be shared :) If you want to take a look to the event photo gallery please click here, and don't forget to visit ElggCampStgo.com Hope you can join us next year on the ElggCamp Santiago 2012 or any time on the following ElggCamps! Cheers! [Less]

Elgg is growing. In the last year our community, user base, and core team have grown. With the addition of the GSoC students, we wanted to improve the way we communicate both internally and with the community. To do this, we've decided to have weekly ... [More] open core team meetings Thursdays at 7:00pm ET in #Elgg on Freenode. In these meetings we'll discuss what we worked on the previous week, what we want to work on the following week, and will have any discussions about problematic tickets that came up during the course of the week. The meetings are open, so anyone is able to attend. If you don't have an IRC client, you can use Freenode's web IRC client. For the meetings, the room will be moderated and at the start of the meeting a moderator will be named who will pass on questions to the general chat. Also, we'll have logs of the meetings so anyone who wants can review them later. We think this is a great opportunity for users to see the processes behind Elgg's development and for us to get immediate feedback from our users, so mark your calendars for Thursdays at 7pm ET and be sure to attend our first meeting! [Less]