Happy birthday Ben - hope you have a great day, and take a rest from Elgg coding :)

These are the features/improvements users can expect to see on elgg.net post v0.4 released a little later this month.

1) New CSS driven theming engine.
2) Your resources - including an aggregated collection of your feeds
3) HTML editor
4) Community membership moderation
5) Anti-spam
6) Emailed comments
7) Watched threads / tracking threads you are interested in
8) Improved code efficiency
9) Improved internationalisation
10) Auto populate your Elgg blog from external blog
11) Enhanced searching - including lists of public communities
12) Aggregated feed of friends and communities
13) Bug repairs that have been reported
14) Some cool RSS functionality

We are now starting the change over to CSS driven themes. This means we are going to remove all existing themes that will not be compatible with this new direction.

Over the next couple of days you will see new themes that will be available for you to use. For those interested in developing their own CSS we will have detailed instructions on how to do this.

If you were using one of the old themes you will be reverted back to the default theme.

Please bear with us during this transition - it will be worth it!

Unfortunately we need to delay the release of v0.4 due to a few unforeseen issues that have arisen.

We will work hard to get this version out by Sat. 21st

All the work we are doing is available on Elgg's SVN - so if you are a developer and want to get the code early feel free to download it from subversion:

svn://elgg.net/devel/

We are hoping to be able to upgrade elgg.net to v0.4 at some point today. This should be a seamless switch with the only major architecture change being themes.

An announcement will be posted once the upgrade has been completed.

Some of you may have noticed that Elgg.net has been upgraded to version 0.4.

This new release marks a large step forward for Elgg, with the introduction of many new features that significantly improve both functionality and performance; see our new information portal for more details. At the same time, we are pleased to announce that Curverider, an Elgg support and services company, has now officially launched for business. Curverider has Elgg's three main developers on its staff and offers the following services:

• Hosting
• Integration
• Customisation
• Consultation
• Training
• Presentations

>> Download press release: PDF or Word Document <<

A big thank you is due to all the developers and users who have helped out on Elgg; you have made a huge difference to the project, and we wouldn't be here without you. Thank you; the road ahead has many exciting features in store, and we can't wait to work with you on them.

 More information is available at the Elgg hub and Curverider.

We really must apologise to users who have been around since the beginning - there have been a lot of changes :)

Still, things are starting to calm down and very shortly all should become clear.

Elgg.net is an instance of the Elgg software - it is not the software's main site, that is at Elgg.org - http://elgg.org.

Elgg.net is where those who are interested in Elgg can gather, try out the software, influence future development decisions, host their pilots - it is an example installation.

Elgg.net is also the test bed for new ideas/plugins - you guys provide us with valuable advice on what to and what not to include in main Elgg releases.