Elgg 0.6 Release Candidate 2 has been made available for download from the project site at elgg.org.

There are numerous new features in this release, including a revamped architecture, support for database servers beyond MySQL, end-to-end Unicode, ClamAV integration and more.  Elggs 0.6 and greater will also now benefit from automatic database upgrades; rather than manually running an SQL schema to upgrade the database from one version to another, Elgg will handle this process automatically.

Please note that this is a Release Candidate and not the final Elgg 0.6 release.  We recommend taking a backup before upgrading any server software, and thoroughly testing your installed system before production use.

If you're interested in the further development of Elgg, it's worth checking out the developers page, which includes a link to our development mailing list. 

Finally, it's worth noting that we'll be moving Elgg.net over to this codebase as of 11am on Saturday May 20th, as well as making some upgrades to the server itself, and the site is liable to be offline for the weekend.

The Elgg.net service will be shutdown for essential upgrades over the 20th/21st of May. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

We have upgraded Elgg.net to the latest Elgg code - v0.6

v0.6 is still a release candidate so if you notice any issues with your account, could you please let us know either by commenting on this blog post or sending a message to system@egg.net - thanks!

For those who have developed their own themes:

You will need to change one small thing on your CSS file. The following attribute needs padding - global_menuoptions li {padding:0 8px 0 0;} (the old CSS had no padding)

Are you a talented web designer?

How would you like to help out on one of the fastest growing learning environments?

For the next release - v0.7 - of Elgg we want to provide two new default site themes out of the box. We want these to be funky, contemporary and usable. At this point we can't offer you pay but we can offer you the opportunity to play an influential, credited, part in the future of Elgg!

Some of major sites powered by Elgg are launching later this summer, and we are confident this is a great opportunity for a talented designer, and an important way to contribute to the future of this open source learning system.

If you are interested, please get in touch: system@elgg.net 

The latest Elgg roadmap has been posted over on the Elgg developers page. Some exciting developments to come!

We have started up a new featured site of the month. This will provide a little insight into who is using Elgg and how.

Released a couple of days early, why not check out June's featured site of the month: Saugus Union School District. 

The final release of Elgg 0.6 has left the building and can be downloaded from the Elgg project page on Eduforge.

There are masses of new features and performance enhancements in this release - we've posted about these before, but here are some of the highlights:

• Database abstraction. Elgg can work with MySQL and Postgres out of the box, and can now be made to work with a much wider variety of database systems.
• ClamAV. Uploaded files can now be scanned for virus infections.
• Moodle integration. This release contains the Elgg half of the Elgg-Moodle integration.
• End-to-end UTF-8 compliance.

We're very proud of this release - and can't wait to talk about some of the new features this code makes possible.