Development blog :: Blog

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

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

Sorry for the long delay since last posting. The development team have been working hard, in partnership with Catalyst, to incorporate all of the code changes implemented by Catalyst into Elgg's core.

From the users prospective nothing much will change but behind the scene there have been big architectural changes. These improve Elgg's scalability, make the incorporation of plugins much easier etc - for a full list see: The value of going Open Source.

A huge thank you is due to Catalyst for putting in so much work.

v0.6 will be released on May 8th.

v0.7 (the interface release) will follow quickly afterward, relatively speaking. This release will see the usability of Elgg greatly enhanced. We have been gathering user data for 8 months, put Elgg in front of usability experts and as a result, have come up with some sweeping improvements that, we feel, moves Elgg to a different level - look out for more information soon.

Thanks to Wizap for offering their custom theme to Elgg users. This is great and we would like to encourage more people to submit their customised themes. Shortly, we will be opening up a theme repository which will allow other Elgg installs to download and use the themes as well as contribute to the bank of available themes.

If you would like to check out this theme go to 'Account Settings' then 'Change theme' it is called 'Wizap'

Screenshot: 

 

Aaron Campbell has written a good comparative review of some blogging software with the classroom in mind. Written in November 2005 - things have evolved considerable with Elgg and no doubt with the other services. Still, it is a useful guide for teachers wanting to get a quick overview of some tools available.

Weblog Applications for EFL/ESL Classroom Blogging: A Comparative Review 

Although Elgg was not built as a blogging platform it is nice to see it stand up well in the comparison chart. The main difference is that Elgg has been designed as an integrated learning landscape (facilitating connections and community) rather than emphasising a single central tool.

Two things worth noting; Elgg does support a form of mobile blog using an XML-RPC client and since this review, has a WYSIWYG editor.

We have some exciting developments coming in the next few weeks which, we feel, will really enhance the Elgg experience. Watch this space.

We are pleased to announce that from Jan 25th a group from the UK's Open University (OU) are piloting Elgg for its tutors. This is great news as we believe Elgg can really fulfill and enhance tutor/student interaction.

We are looking for people who would like to build themes for Elgg and then share them with the wider community. We are hoping to build up an excellent library of themes that everyone can take advantage of. All themes accepted will be released under a GPL license.

For information about how to build an Elgg theme please check out the information portal - specifically the section on themes.

Thanks! 

We are pleased to announce the release of Elgg 0.4.

Click here to download it from Eduforge. 

v0.4 will be released on Monday Jan 23rd - there are a couple of issues to sort out before the release, namely the embedding of images into your blog post. Please bear with us as we sort this out.

Here is a list of all the changes/features included within v0.4:

1. WYSIWYG Editor
   
2. Emailed comments
   
3. Community moderation
   
4. Account moderation
5. Option to select if you want open comments or not
   
6. CSS driven theming engine - this meant a redesign of themes and stylesheets
   
7. Embedded MP3 player
   
8. Visualisation plugin
   
9. Calendar functionality (Provide by Mancomm)
   
10. Your Resources - feed aggregator
    
11. Spam control
    
12. Recent activity enhanced - you can now flag conversations (either by commenting , or using the 'flag as interesting' option) you are interested in following, selecting 'View your activity' will then let you see any further conversations that happen on those posts.
    
13. Improved code efficiency
    
14. Notification of the access level on your blog posts
    
15. New Elgg resource - this is for both developers and users. It can be accessed here: http://elgg.org/info
    

Note: Upgrading to this version will mean all your existing themes are now redundant.

Didn't make it:

1. Enhanced searching
   
2. Importing blog content into your Elgg blog
   
3. Aggregated feed of friends and community
   
4. Community listing
5. A more effective way to upload your theme images
   

These will all be ready soon.