Weekly wrap-up: Community Site, Database Encoding and Data Dir fixes, and Releases

Hello all!

The community site will be down Tuesday, September 29th for a migration to a new server. We expect this migration to be painless, but plan for downtime between 10:00am EST - 4:00pm EST. Please make plans accordingly.

On to the dev talk!

It was an extremely busy week working to get 1.6.2 out and helping to upgrade one of the largest Elgg sites on the web. I've been up to my eyes in MySQL character set manuals and discussions and building recursive data-mangling functions. The good news is that tags #1234 and #1231 are fixed! Elgg 1.6.2 will contain two upgrades, one to the database and one to the data directory. I haven't yet committed these to SVN pending some generalisations and Elggifications that need to be completed. The database upgrades will bring full, correct UTF8 support to the database, while the data directory upgrade will fix the "no profile icon" / "all my files are gone!!!" issue on user names with non-alpha-numeric characters.

1.6.2 is still on target to be released in the next week. After some internal discussion, I would like to ask the community to comment on the timing of the releases. As a team, we are still learning the best ways to release software. Previously, months would pass between versions. In 1.6, a bugfix release went out only a month after the major release, and another bugfix will be out within a month after that. 1.7 is scheduled to be released in November, and baring any complications with 1.6.2, it will be the next version. Is this too fast? Too slow? Just right? Please let us know!