Elgg 1.7 beta has been released

It's with great pleasure that I announce Elgg 1.7 beta has been released! Grab a copy from the downloads page and start testing!

I would like to remind everyone that while many bugs have been corrected, Elgg 1.7 is still beta quality software and should not be used in a production environment. When upgrading, be sure to back up your current installation and closely follow the documented procedures in UPGRADE.txt. In addition to these instructions, Cash has written an informative series of posts on the community site about preparing for the 1.7 upgrade.

As previously mentioned, Elgg 1.7 enhances security by requiring security tokens on all actions. Plugins that have not been updated to use security tokens will produce a "Form is missing __token or __ts fields" error. For authors of plugins that do not have security tokens, please review the documentation on actions and security for information about how to add tokens to your plugins.

Read more

Code freeze for Elgg 1.7

SVN is officially in a code freeze pending the Elgg 1.7 beta release. Wow, it feels good to say that!

This means that all new functionality is finalized and only bug fixes will be made in SVN. We think all major bugs have been resolved and the core is ready to be beta tested, but want a few more days of testing before we are comfortable releasing a beta to the general public. If you have a spare minute, please grab the latest SVN and give it a try. Note that this is not yet ready to be used on a production server!

Read more

Distributed Version Control With Git

Developers, ever use Git? Git, like Subversion, is a (distributed) version control system: a way to track changes across each of your files, forever. Just as Subversion was a leap ahead of CVS, Git surpasses Subversion, particularly in regards to branching and merging.

Subversion branching is a cumbersome process at best: "svn copy" commands are executed at some revision number, which you must keep track of for later merging. Any time you port trunk changes into your branch, you have to again carefully note from X to Y revision. Add to the mix multiple developers each with their own branches and maintenance becomes a nightmare.

Read more

Reminder about reporting security problems, new plugins policy

This is just a quick reminder that for the protection of all Elgg sites, security issues found in Elgg should be reported to security@elgg.com instead of listed on trac, the community site, or the mailing lists.

How is everyone finding the new plugin area on the community site? Since its launch last week there have been generally positive reviews of it. I am pleased with how it functions but know there are a few oddities and hope to continually improve it. The new plugin area features simpler ways for plugin authors to showcase their plugin, recommend releases to their users, request donations, and link to an external project home page.

Read more

Action tokens required in Elgg 1.7

Security is something I take very seriously in Elgg. Over a year ago action tokens were introduced to counter CSRF attacks. Since Elgg 1.5, forms that did not include action tokens generated visible errors to alert admins and plugin authors of deprecated code. To ensure the security of all Elgg sites, all actions in Elgg 1.7 will require security tokens.

Plugin and theme authors may want to review the documentation on actions and security to make sure their plugins are correctly using the views to generate tokens. To supplement this page, I have written a brief description of when to use actions, page handlers, or include a file directly.

This was the last outstanding issue for 1.7. I will be testing and bugfixing this change before issuing an official beta for 1.7.

Introducing an enterprise edition of Elgg

Late last year we soft launched a supported version of Elgg aimed at the education market called ElggCampus. Shortly after releasing information about ElggCampus, it became clear that a supported version of Elgg was required by a wider audience so we made the decision to launch an enterprise edition aimed at any individual or organisation requiring a supported version of Elgg.

The enterprise edition of Elgg comes in several flavours; turnkey, dedicated SaaS or on-site. If you would like to find out more, head over to elgg.com. 

Note: If you signed up for a demo of ElggCampus, we will add you to the list for elgg.com and make sure you get an invite shortly.

Elgg 1.7's API

One of the most exciting features of Elgg 1.7 is the reworked entity-retrieving API. The decision to use an array instead of function arguments might seem a bit strange at first, as not many PHP applications use this approach, but it should be familiar to any one who has used a language with named arguments or even JavaScript APIs like jQuery.

Read more

v1.7 update

As many of you will know, v1.7 is the next version of Elgg due for release. A few folks have been asking for an update on a potential release date. At this time, we are unable to give an exact date for release as we want to make sure we have tackled all the items we feel are important and ensure it is has been thoroughly tested.

If you have been following the commit timeline, you will know that there has been significant development on the core. The aim is to sort out some of the annoying issues which have persisted in Elgg since v1.0 and to introduce better coding standards. We feel that it is worth taking the time to make sure v1.7 is the most stable version of Elgg so far and a solid platform for you to build upon.

We are currently working with developers in the community to test, debug and patch any remaining or unexpected issues that arise during testing. If you would like to help out, please feel free to grab the nightly build or latest from SVN and report back any issues you find. Patches are also welcome and can be uploaded to Elgg's trac. I need to stress - DO NOT USE THE NIGHTLY BUILD OR LATEST SVN ON A PRODUCTION SERVICE.

We would like to thank everyone for their patience.

A call to developers, Collaboration, and ElggCamp BA

Elgg 1.7 is getting close. A few of the final pieces are coming into place and I'd like to ask developers to grab the latest SVN to help us test. Please point your SVN client to http://code.elgg.org/elgg/trunk/ and give it a go!

Read more

Elgg 1.7 development, Elgg Users Google Group, and ElggCamp BA

Greetings all!

Sorry for the delay in posting--I've been busy in both my developer and personal life and haven't had a chance to sit down over the weekend to write a wrap-up. I've received quite a few emails from people asking after 1.7. No need to worry: development of 1.7 is going well and I'm hopeful to have a developer's preview release out the door by the end of this week, with 1.7 final out sometime in December.

Read more