Edinburgh Napier Education Exchange

After watching this video about an new initiative at Edinburgh Napier University, I got in touch with one of the team there to find out how things were developing. Colin Gray was kind enough to answer a couple of questions.

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Graphic designers

Over the coming months we are looking to build up a bank of high quality graphic/interface designers who are interested in contract work. Experience with Elgg is a bonus but not a requirement. If this sounds like you, could you send us an email with some samples of your work, rates and availability info@elgg.com. Thanks.

An introduction

Just a quick blog post to introduce myself.

I recently joined Elgg in a business development capacity. Having followed the project for a while, I'm excited by its potential and am looking forward to further developing the open source business opportunities that are available.

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Advertising on the community site

The amount of distasteful and spam-like advertising on the community site has increased lately, especially in the profile and plugins sections. I wish my fellow developers well in their livelihoods, but everyone must remember that the community site is not an advertising space.

I wrote a similar post describing how to tastefully advertise your services:

The current plan is to allow those who wish to offer consulting services for Elgg to do so tastefully through their profile and the Professional Services group.

This post has been generally ignored, resulting in the need to revise the community site's policies and terms.

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Reminder about reporting security problems, new plugins policy

This is just a quick reminder that for the protection of all Elgg sites, security issues found in Elgg should be reported to security@elgg.com instead of listed on trac, the community site, or the mailing lists.

How is everyone finding the new plugin area on the community site? Since its launch last week there have been generally positive reviews of it. I am pleased with how it functions but know there are a few oddities and hope to continually improve it. The new plugin area features simpler ways for plugin authors to showcase their plugin, recommend releases to their users, request donations, and link to an external project home page.

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Weekly Wrap-up: Nick, Elgg 1.6.2, and Roadmaps

Greetings all!

(I need to work on a better salutation...hrm...)

Another good week here with Elgg devel! I have some bits of development info to talk about, but first, some extra-exciting news: starting Monday, my good friend and previous coworker, Nick Whitt (@nogoodnick) will be joining our dev team! Welcome Nick!

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jQuery Conference Wrap-up

Greetings all!

I've just returned from an amazing trip to Boston for the jQuery Conference at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (aka: "The MS NERD Center"). I saw amazing presentations, met awesome people, ate great, great food, and partook in a fair amount of IE bashing like only JS and CSS developers can.

I attended sessions about Javascript and Ajax best practices, improving JS speed, accessibility using the W3C's ARIA specification, some fun sessions showing how easy and exciting theming in JS can be, and sessions about what's just over the horizon for JS and jQuery. (FYI: jQuery 1.3.3 will be fantastic.) Over the following days and weeks I'll post more specifics about the sessions I attended, but for now I want to talk about some take-aways I hope to use to improve Elgg's Javascript and Ajax.

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jQuery Conference 2009

Greetings all!

As I've mentioned previously, I'm very excited to be going to the jQuery conference in Boston this weekend. Officially, I'll be representing Elgg and learning how we can better implement Javascript and Ajax. Unofficially, I'll be there because jQuery is just plain neat.

The schedule is pretty full, but of particular interest to me (and Elgg) will be discussions about how to implement unobtrusive Javascript, and how to improve Elgg's accessibility. For all the fellow US educators out there, this means improving Section 508 compliance.

Another project I think the conference can provide resources for is the work I'm doing to replace the current sliding Friends Picker with a faster, more versatile User Picker, the (meager) beginnings of which can be found in SVN.

Is anyone else from the Elgg community coming to the conference? If so, find me--I'll be in the Elgg shirt!

Weekly wrap-up: Elgg Demo Site details, Elgg 1.6.1 bugfixes, and Updated Collections

Greetings all!

It's been another busy week with Elgg. We've pulled in quite a few patches preparing for a 1.6.1 release early next week that will fix some bugs discovered in 1.6. Also, we've established a good base for the Demo site and I've been working on updating the Access Collections for 1.7+.

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Weekly wrap-up: Community, Elgg 1.6 bugsfixes, and Elgg Demo Site

Greetings all! It's been a busy couple weeks for Elgg following Elgg Camp Boston. I think I'm finally recovered, but I already have my eyes on the jQuery conference next month. Anyone else going?

Just to keep everyone up to date, I'm really pleased with the direction the community is starting to take in Elgg. Trac has been active from the community side with bug reports and confirmations, and active on the core developers side with fixes. A detailed bug report and confirmation or additional details from multiple users goes a long way to help us fix bugs!

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