Elgg 1.7 Release Candidate 1 Released!

I'm pleased to announce that following an extremely successful beta, Elgg 1.7 RC1 has been released! Visit the downloads page to find it.

Remember that though we have fixed many bugs since the beta, Elgg 1.7 RC1 is not appropriate for use on production sites.

The amount of bug reports and interaction on Trac has been amazing for the beta and I want to thank everyone who has participated! Please keep it up for this release candidate!

Elgg 1.7 beta has been released

It's with great pleasure that I announce Elgg 1.7 beta has been released! Grab a copy from the downloads page and start testing!

I would like to remind everyone that while many bugs have been corrected, Elgg 1.7 is still beta quality software and should not be used in a production environment. When upgrading, be sure to back up your current installation and closely follow the documented procedures in UPGRADE.txt. In addition to these instructions, Cash has written an informative series of posts on the community site about preparing for the 1.7 upgrade.

As previously mentioned, Elgg 1.7 enhances security by requiring security tokens on all actions. Plugins that have not been updated to use security tokens will produce a "Form is missing __token or __ts fields" error. For authors of plugins that do not have security tokens, please review the documentation on actions and security for information about how to add tokens to your plugins.

Read more

Action tokens required in Elgg 1.7

Security is something I take very seriously in Elgg. Over a year ago action tokens were introduced to counter CSRF attacks. Since Elgg 1.5, forms that did not include action tokens generated visible errors to alert admins and plugin authors of deprecated code. To ensure the security of all Elgg sites, all actions in Elgg 1.7 will require security tokens.

Plugin and theme authors may want to review the documentation on actions and security to make sure their plugins are correctly using the views to generate tokens. To supplement this page, I have written a brief description of when to use actions, page handlers, or include a file directly.

This was the last outstanding issue for 1.7. I will be testing and bugfixing this change before issuing an official beta for 1.7.

A word on donations, open source, and the Elgg community site

Recently there have been an increasing number of posts on the community site related to donations and paid support / solutions on the community site. I have made a couple posts addressing this, but it's still occurring with increasing frequency.

Read more

A few more Elgg powered sites

April has seen a host of new Elgg powered sites emerge and the number of plugins contributed by members of the community has risen to an impressive 589. Thank you to everyone who is taking the time to share their work and help improve Elgg.

Here are a couple of the new Elgg powered networks (If you’d like your network featured, please get in touch):

Read more

Some Elgg powered sites

It is always great to see people picking up Elgg and applying it to their own niche. The fascinating thing about online communities is the diversity, everyone has something different they are into and software like Elgg can help those groups create a vibrant online community.

Elgg 1.5 has been downloaded tens of thousands of times over the past three weeks, since release. With new networks springing up every day, here are a small sample.

Random:

• Classicrods - for classic car enthusiasts.
• Hapas - a community to share your individual stories about the multiracial Asian experience through words, pictures, videos, and collaboration.
• RailRefund - a space for disgruntled commuters.
• The Lab - a network for models and clients.
• Skydiving - a site for German skydivers.
• pbop.de - another German network, not really sure what it is about but it looks fun.
• MaestroZone - connect and share with other musicians in the world.
• theatregig - a free online community that connects theatre people in community, regional, academic and professional theatre – worldwide.
• Chukkest - is the exclusive online social network designed for those who love Polo ponies.

Education:

• c41pt.net - a Social Learning Network for Learning Professionals to discuss the use of social media and social learning.
• uTicked - social bookmarking for teachers.
• Université de Montréal - a Université de Montréal network.
• CMUOnet - a fully functional social networking system, connecting CMUO learners and creating communities of learning.

Professional:

• UnionBook - the social networking site for trade unionists.
• Tickerheads - a space for traders.
• Hedgehogs - the space for the hedge fund & investment community.
• International Process and Performance Institute - learn more about how we help organizations reduces their costs, increase their customer satisfaction, and improve their bottom line.

One of the fastest growing areas of Elgg adoption is for company Intranets, to help improve internal communication. As most are behind a firewall, there are no links to those networks. This is a space I think we are going to see expand over the coming year and for which Elgg is well positioned to make inroads. There are options such as SocialText, Jive and Yammer in the space already, however, Elgg brings a rich set of features to the mix and a growing open source community, making it an attractive option.

Elgg 1.1 is out

We're pleased to announce that Elgg 1.1 has left the building.

If you're new to Elgg, you'll be surprised by its flexibility and ease of use. But if you're already running Elgg, why should you upgrade to version 1.1? Here's a couple of reasons:

Your site will run significantly faster. Elgg 1.1 contains database and cache enhancements that make it dramatically more efficient on your server and speedier for your users.

Read more

Weekly round-up: stats, roadmap, themes and more stats

During the week I did a little number crunching to find out what has been going on with Elgg since we launched v1.0 around 8 weeks ago. Without going into much depth, the stats are impressive.

Read more

Weekly roundup: SMS, Twitter, OFE and The Wire

It has been a busy week!

We started the week with the ongoing push towards Elgg 1.1, including a number of bug fixes and some translations. The biggest change this week was to move sessions over to a database store - this provides more scalability options as well as making things more secure on shared hosts.

Read more

Elgg Meets and further development

Thanks to everyone who made it along to the recent Elgg Meets in Brighton and Edinburgh. It's always good to hear what people are doing (or thinking of doing) with Elgg, and the range is incredible: from artists' communities through commercial social networks, corporate intranets and academic research.

We'll have more meets over the next few months; if you'd like us to come to your neck of the woods, get in touch. (Remember that we can also arrange more formal training sessions.) In addition to this, we'll be helping out on the Open Forum Europe stand at the Linux Expo Live at London Olympia this Thursday, October 23, and on Saturday, October 25th. Of course, we've also got the International Elgg Conference on December 1st in Brighton.

Read more