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.

If you're putting together a mashup, you can use these views very simply. You may have noticed when you're looking at a page with a list of items on it, that there are buttons in the top left which link to either a RSS or an OpenDD view.

Now when you click on one of those you'll see your data presented in an entirely different way. Now one of the fun things you can do is change that by altering the "view" parameter, for example "view=json" to get a JSON view.

You can export individual items of data (that you have access to) in different ways by visiting the "export" url. For example, to export GUID 1 (which will almost certainly be the first site you set up) visit:

http://mysite.com/export/opendd/1/

Of course, if you replace "opendd" with "json" or "php" you can see this data presented in an entirely different way. Additionally, you can also add support for other formats, as I discussed in a previous article.

On top of that, there is an API system where plugin writers can export a function as public. These functions can then be called via a rest-like api (discussed in more detail here).

You can then select how you want to then see that data - whether its PHP, XML or JSON etc.

So, in a nutshell, Elgg has some quite powerful tools for quickly and easily creating some pretty funky mashups. Have fun!

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?

Elgg was founded in 2004, and - as is common with open source projects - we slowly released software with version numbers from 0.1 through to 0.9 over a period of three years. This was an evolution of the same codebase, and as we came up with new ideas and learned new lessons, we churned the code back into the core. We could have continued to do the same, but the feature list and what we wanted to do was so different by the end of last year that we made a brave decision: we rewrote from scratch.

Because of that, we could incorporate everything that was important to Elgg - granular access permissions, cross-site tagging, an emphasis on personal ownership - while adding an extremely consistent API layer, an internal event system unmatched in any web application, and extra functionality that we think is necessary to power the next generation of social applications, right into the core. While many applications take a simple beginning and try and duct tape social networking and next-gen features over the top, we started again. And as a result, Elgg is fast, flexible, extensible and ready to power the next evolution of social technology. It's not just the most popular open source social networking platform; we believe it's the best.

There's been a lot of talk about open source social networking recently, and a lot of you are doubtless wondering what makes Elgg different. The answer is this: Elgg has been designed, from the first line of code to the last, to be a flexible social network. It's not an organic evolution or a grass-roots development; it's architecture, and we're extremely proud of it.

At its heart is user control. Over the next few years, the explosion in niche social networks, and otherwise socially-enabled websites, will lead to new technologies that will allow you to federate your connections all over the Internet. This presents new opportunities for exciting new applications, but as I recently discussed with Demo.com, it also opens new opportunities for your data to be abused. Therefore, you need to control exactly what is released, and to whom. That's the core principle in Elgg.

We're very proud to have released Elgg 1.0, but this is only the beginning. Watch this space.

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.

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.

First of all, this is possibly one of the best looking versions of Elgg ever. A lot of this is due to the efforts of our resident design guru Pete Harris, who has done a fantastic job in making the graphics and the user experience top notch.

There has also been a lot of work done under the hood...

There's the views system which easily lets you skin Elgg and completely change its look and feel. For example we have the default view, which is the one you see when you log into a site (and can be extended and changed by installed plugins). This could just as easily be a mobile view for display on mobile devices.

We have provided RSS and OpenDD views which you'll see links for if you look a list of objects.

There's the database schema which we have mentioned before. We have taken a very abstract view, so now everything is an entity with metadata and relationships between them... those of you familiar with the OpenDD schema will notice some familiarity. This is not an accident.

There is also the concept in Elgg 1 that pretty much everything is a plugin, and therefore we have made plugins stupidly easy to write. A lot of the stuff that every plugin has to do is taken care of by the framework. There are ways to list objects, a notification system, XML-RPC, import/export out of the box, a robust internationalisation system, API and even views designed for data import (which have protection against various forms of attack).

In Elgg there are a whole bunch of things that all come together and mean that plugin writers only need to worry about the thing their plugin needs to do.

There is a comprehensive admin panel which plugins can extend. Plugins can be individually enabled and disabled, and can have administrator and user configurable settings. There's a framework for displaying widgets on pages which plugins can hook into.

As well as all the framework stuff that make development easier, the actual system is pretty fully featured. You have blogs, forums, messaging, bookmaking, a river of events (which again plugins can easily hook into), and an admin system log.

All this stuff and more come together to make a very easy to use and full featured social networking platform.

Give it a try!

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.

From the site: Social networks are walled gardens. Even if you can see content, you can't add people as friends from other networks, or keep track of their content in open, generic ways beyond RSS. Or can you? We'll give you tools to connect your site or application to the social cloud today.

This isn't cloud as in proprietary cloud computing of the sort rightly critcised by the likes of Tim O'Reilly. We're talking about a global, decentralised web of social connections that operates through open standards and generic APIs, much like the World Wide Web itself. We see this happening partially through the Open Data Definition, and we'll be explaining how to make it work in practice, not at some arbitrary point in the future, but now.

With people like Kevin Marks - one of the people behind OpenSocial - talking about contributing in the comments, it promises to be an interesting hour. All we ask is that if you'd like to see it, please head over to the panel page on the SXSW site and vote. We'd love to see you there.

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!

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.

I'm going to talk a little bit about how this works. Firstly, Export.

Export works via the views system, and involves creating a brand new view hierarchy for your new format.

We first need to create a plugin, and in this plugin we create a "views" directory. We need to then create a new directory for your format, and then create a couple of views underneath.

The image above shows the necessary file hierarchy that you need to create - in this instance to export "myformat".

Create a directory called "export". In this directory place the three php files - entity.php, metadata.php and relationship.php - which handle entities, metadata (and annotations) and relationships respectively.

Each of these files are passed objects via $vars. Depending on which file you are in, this might be $vars['entity'], $vars['metadata'] or $vars['relationship'].

It is then up to you to encode and output the object according to your format.

All that remains is to provide the pageshell which handles how the overall page is displayed. This file may set the content-type header or provide wrapping tags (e.g. for XML output).

pageshell.php is passed $vars['body'] containing the output of your other files.

Providing a handler to deal with importing data is also fairly simple, and works through the action interface.

In your plugin's init function register the action "import/YOURFORMAT", and point it to your actions/import/myformat.php, e.g.

<?php

	function myformatplugin_init()

	{

		global $CONFIG;
		// Register import action

		register_action('import/myformat', false,

		  $CONFIG->pluginspath . "myformatplugin_init/actions/import/myformat.php");

	}
	// Initialise

	register_elgg_event_handler('init','system','myformatplugin_init');

?>

This will then register an import action which will be picked up by the administrator import export utility. Your action can access the information it needs to import with the call:

$data = get_input('data');

Elgg 1.0 will ship with native support for OpenDD (both import and export) which will allow administrators to migrate between Elgg classic and the new codebase with a minimum amount of effort.

Elgg 1.0 also offers export views in JSON and PHP native, making it easier to reference the data directly and create mashups.

Over time we will be adding more import and export functionality, and I hope you will be too!

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.

In Elgg 1.0, you can group your friends into collections: for example, close friends, work colleagues, or perhaps people working with you on a particular project. These collections can then be used to share bookmarks or other items, as well as easily reference content by subdivisions of your friends. Perhaps most powerfully, these also feed into your access control options when you create a new item of content.

When you upload an item, you're presented with a pulldown menu containing three default options (Public, Logged in users and Private), as well as any friends collections you've created and - when you're uploading to a group - the option to restrict it to a group's members only. Plugins can also add to this list, to create different kinds of access controls.

These go straight to the core of the data model. It's not that content a user doesn't have access to is never displayed; it's never retrieved from the database or touched by the Elgg software at all. Every entity in the system (including the site itself) has an access level at its centre.

However, the access permission system has an override hook built into it, so that Elgg plugins can provide completely different access systems. Some might want to provide an interface over the top based on Active Directory roles (particularly when used in conjunction with Elgg's LDAP integration); some might provide integrations with other systems or entirely new ways of controlling permissions. We always recommend using an access system in conjunction with Elgg's built in one, but you can effectively replace it entirely.

This has potential uses in a number of places. For example, schools may need certain users to have the ability to see all content for various reasons. Meanwhile, many enterprises may already have an access system in place across their network, and might want it to persist within their Elgg-powered intranet. Either way, we've anticipated the need, and Elgg is ready to take it on.

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.