Those of you seeking a little help in using the system may find the following PDF file useful; David Tosh has prepared a user manual. It's an open source draft, so all comments are welcomed with thanks.

Elgg end user manual v1.0 (doc)
Elgg end user manual v1.0 (pdf)

You can invite other people into Elgg – doing so will add them to your friends list.

1) Click on the menu option 'invite a friend'
2) Enter their name and email address
3) There is space to write an optional message
4) Click 'invite'
5) That is it

Note: the invitation will expire after 7 days if they do not activate it.

Ben has been working on a development manual. It's still very much a work in progress as opposed to a final release (there are pieces missing, etc), but we thought we'd let it loose as a preview for those of you wanting to know more about the internal workings; it describes the basic engine and the role of the database data. More will be added over the week, and we'll update the following link accordingly.

Download the Development manual (Last updated: Sunday 11 April.) at the development blog

This is a feature that allows you view all the weblog posts made (of course this will only show ones where the owner has marked it public or if you are part of one of their groups).

All weblog posts

We've added some new RSS functionality this evening:

RSS feeds for file repositories

File repositories now have RSS feeds, so you can syndicate your files to the outside world. You'll see the link to the right of the "file storage" box if you've uploaded any files; URLs are of the form http://elgg.net/username/files/rss.

Filters for RSS feeds

Both the weblog and files RSS feeds can now be filtered by tag. If you're only interested in posts that (for example) Dave Tosh makes regarding Elgg, you can tell your RSS reader to only pick up that sub-feed. Equally, if you only want to see his Elgg-related files, pick those up too.

Links to these are provided if you click on a keyword underneath a user's files or weblog posts, or if you click on a particular user's icon in the "weblog posts" or "files" sections of the tag search page.

If you want to manually get a sub-feed, you can just amend /tag to the end of an RSS feed's URL, e.g.:

• http://elgg.net/username/files/rss/tag
• http://elgg.net/username/weblog/rss/tag

Support for podcasting

We've amended the RSS for files so that they're compatible with the podcasting standard. All you have to do to start your own podcast is upload some media files and attach a particular keyword to them (we recommend the obvious "podcast"). Make the URL of your podcast sub-feed known and anyone with podcasting software can pick up your uploads automatically.

(What is podcasting? Wikipedia knows the answer.)

A big thank you to Alison for building us a really nice template. This new template is called Teatime and is now available as one of the general options for learners to choose from.

We've added another RSS feed, which this time aggregates both file and weblog activity for a particular user. You'll a user's link under their main sidebar icon on any page owned by them.

You can also filter it by tag, as with all the other feeds; currently there's no interface for this aside from on the URL line, but for example if you wanted to view all activity related to "elgg" on the news weblog you'd visit:

• http://elgg.net/news/rss/elgg

We'll add a link from the tag search pages soon.

We've got a new release out that incorporates all the patches for April (thanks again to David Eshelman and Sven Edge!) and adds new RSS functionality. Go to the development blog for all the details.

We are pleased to announce that Alison Wong will be joining the Elgg development team. Alison will be helping out with the templating side of things, developing cool new interfaces for Elgg.

We are excited with this development and we look forward to the impact Alison's contributions will make to Elgg.

We have just launched a blog dedicated to providing hints and tips on Elgg's many features. This blog will be updated periodically with short examples and tutorials on how to use the features and get the most out of Elgg.

If there is anything you would like explained or demonstrated please leave a comment on the blog.

Hints and tips

We are pleased to confirm that Elgg has received 6 months of independent funding. We will be posting a roadmap very shortly - keep checking back.