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Now that Elgg 1.0 is finally out of the door, I think it is time to talk a little bit about about some of the more advanced features - namely APIs and data formats!
Elgg 1.0 provides a number of ways at getting at your data, including a number of natively supported data formats; including OpenDD (of course), JSON, PHP, and of course RSS.
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Elgg 1.0 has officially left the building. As we've already announced, it comes in two flavours: a full version with lots of features pre-installed, and a core designed for you to build your own social networking application on top of.
The archive for the full version is 1.43Mb - small enough to fit on a floppy disk, if anyone still used them. The core-only archive weighs in at less than 700k. Elgg is fully-featured and extremely powerful both to run as a stand-alone social network and as a basis for programming on top of. So why is it so small?
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We are pleased to announce that Elgg v1.0 has now left the building and is available to download in two flavours, the core engine and the full Elgg package.
The core engine is for those wishing to build up their own network from the beginning, whereas the full Elgg package is the core Elgg engine plus the following plugins pre-loaded: blogs, files, pages, bookmarks, messageboard, status, TinyMCE and private messages.
For more information you can check out the new elgg.org website, and if you are keen to get involved, join one of the two mailing lists. There is a mailing list for developers to talk tech and another one for Elgg users. There is also a demo installation available.
We would like to extend a big thank you to all of those Elgg users who helped us to test this latest version of Elgg over the past few months, we appreciate it.
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With the release of the long awaited Elgg 1 platform now imminent I just thought I'd take the opportunity to go over a few of the things that make this version so cool.
A lot of these things I and my colleagues have covered before in previous blog posts, but I thought I'd give a brief summary of just a few of them.
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South by Southwest is one of the most exciting festivals and conferences in the world. Every year, thousands of people converge on Austin, Texas to celebrate film, music and the interactive arts. It's where services like Twitter became famous, and Silicon Valley meets digital literates from all over the world.
Because this is a different sort of conference, submitted panels need to be voted on by potential attendees. The panels that people most want to see will get programmed; the others are free to come back and try again next year.
This year, we've submitted a panel about what we're calling the social cloud.
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Some of you have expressed interest in participating in the Elgg 1.0 development process. Here are a couple of ways you can join in and help us test the software.
If you're a less technical user, we'd like to invite you to come into our test community. This is now open for registration, so all you need to do is visit test.elgg.org and sign up for an account. We'd love to hear your feedback, and you'll find an Elgg Feedback group there for the purpose. (Please note that we'll be blanking the database from time to time.)
If you're a developer, we're pleased to announce that our source code repository is now public. Point your Subversion client at the following repositories:
- Core Elgg: https://code.elgg.org/elgg/
- Elgg plugins: https://code.elgg.org/extensions/
Please note that this is not an end user release, and development is still ongoing. The intention is to bring developers in to help us test the platform.
To this end, we've also set up a development mailing list, which you can access over here. There is also an evolving set of documentation.
We hope you enjoy getting into Elgg, and again, please let us know what you think. Thanks!
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 We're pleased to announce that Elgg has been featured as the best open source social networking platform in InfoWorld's 2008 Best Of Open Source Awards. Elgg joins WordPress, which won for best blogging platform, Firefox, which won for best web browser, and MySQL, which was featured as the best database system.
From the article:
While Elgg lets corporations, governments, and schools quickly establish blogs, the system's collaborative features encourage building communities of users with shared interests. Other Elgg fine points include podcast support, file repositories, user profiles, an RSS aggregator, and branding features. Significantly, the software integrates with other IT systems and provides OpenID authentication.
We're pleased to do all that and more with Elgg 1.0, due for release on August 18th.
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Perhaps one of the most useful and unique features about Elgg 1.0 is its ability to import and export data. Initially this is accomplished via OpenDD, but we have added hooks which make it very easy to add other formats.
I'm going to talk a little bit about how this works. Firstly, Export.
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One of Elgg's most powerful features since day one has been its access controls. Any item of content you create - an uploaded file, a blog post, an element on your profile - can be restricted to as many or as few people as you want. For example, an event announcement might be publicly viewable, but you might also have some internal notes that you only want your close colleagues to see. Elgg deals with these distinctions securely and easily.
For the latest version, we've dramatically improved both the interface and the flexibility of the access permission system. Creating collections of friends is easier than ever before, and if you don't like Elgg's individual-based access model, you can swap it out with something else - for example, a roles-based access control list.
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Over the past few weeks some Elgg users and developers have been helping us beta test Elgg v1.0 on both the code and interface side of things. This has been a worthwhile process with the beta testers picking up on a few things that we had missed out/overlooked. All in all, feedback has been positive and we are working to implement some of the suggested changes. I would like to say thanks to those of you who have given up some of your valuable time to help with the testing, it is appreciated.
If you are waiting for the official release, it will happen once we have completed this testing phase.
In other news, this report highlights Elgg as a rising star in the arena of Open Source CMS platforms. This is good news as we look to continue developing a state-of-the-art social platform.
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