Those of you who use the HTML editor to write your blog posts will notice a few extra features have been added. These are:

1) Emotions

2) Preview - this will let you check out your post or comment before you submit

3) Styling - I know some people find the font too small, use this feature to increase your font size

4) Find/Replace - this is for those of you who write long posts

5) AutoWarning - this popup will notify you if you have not saved your post or comment

All feedback is welcome. 

If you would like to create blog categories you can by clicking on 'Manage blog categories' in the blog submenu.

This is done through the use of tags. Just select a few tags which you would like to make your categories, then use them to tag your posts. 

This is a heads up for all Elgg.net users. Shortly we will be upgrading to Elgg v0.7 - this is a serious upgrade that will deactivate your own themes. The reason for this is because we have changed the site navigation to make things easier to use and easier to customise.

From this point on Elgg will have a simple page structure which will hopefully result in many more themes becoming available.

[Update: Elgg.net will be upgraded tomorrow, we will attempt to keep disruption to the service down to a minimum.] 

After an easy upgrade process, Elgg.net is back online. We've recoded the way the front page works on the backend - which won't make much difference to you, but makes maintaining the site much easier for us.

So what can you expect from this upgrade?



The first thing you'll probably notice is the new toolbar, which remains constant across everybody's themes. We've received a lot of comments over the years that the old-style tabs were confusing; the toolbar replaces these. It's yours: clicking the buttons at the top of the screen will always bring you back to your pages. You can trust links below there to belong to whoever owns the page you're currently looking at.



We've expanded our codebase to allow for all kinds of different file folders. Currently we've enabled the default (the one you've always used) and a photo gallery. You can create new photo gallery folders in the usual way, or convert your existing folders into photo galleries - just select 'photo gallery' under 'folder type' when creating or editing. We think this is a much better way to showcase photographs, diagrams or other images you might have lying around. Of course, this being Elgg, you can also upload any other type of files to your photogallery; they'll be displayed underneath. (See Ben's photo galleries for examples.) There will also be more folders added over time - podcast jukebox, anyone?



If you enjoy writing your own themes, you'll be pleased to see that the template structure has been dramatically simplified. Documentation will be released shortly on our forthcoming support site, which will be out soon. We'll also be quietly releasing a number of themes over time - and would love to see some that you've designed. If you've made a great theme that you'd like other people to be able to use, let us know!

Because we've changed the template system, we've disabled your current ones. We're aware this is a drag, and have left them online (albeit in a renamed form) so you can adapt them if you like, or retrieve any links etc you may have hardcoded into your sidebar. You shouldn't switch back to them; they probably won't work at all, and will definitely look very odd indeed. This was a hard decision to make, but it needed to be done, and we decided we'd rather do this now than later down the line.

There are plenty of other changes under the hood that make things more efficient, with more to come. We hope you enjoy them; as always, let us know if you have any feedback or potential improvements. Cheers!