Weekly Wrap-up: Nick, Elgg 1.6.2, and Roadmaps

Greetings all!

(I need to work on a better salutation...hrm...)

Another good week here with Elgg devel! I have some bits of development info to talk about, but first, some extra-exciting news: starting Monday, my good friend and previous coworker, Nick Whitt (@nogoodnick) will be joining our dev team! Welcome Nick!

One of Nick's first big dev projects will be to wrangle out a real query class in Elgg. Having worked with Nick before, I have a fairly good idea what's coming, and it is exciting. If there are any Active Record fans in the crowd, you'll be pleased. If not, yeah me neither ;) Regardless of if you like Active Record, no one can say the code below isn't fantastic:

	$all_users = new ElggQuery('entities', array('type' => 'user'));

	foreach($all_users as $user) {

		// real ElggUser!

		echo $user->getURL();

	}

Think about how you'd have to do that in the current Elgg. Much nicer above! Again, I'm very excited to have Nick join our team. Now, on to the dev stuff.

There have been two major problems reported with Elgg 1.6(.1): Tags with extended characters don't work, and usernames with certain characters break files and photos. Elgg 1.6.2 is preliminarily scheduled for release the last week of September with fixes for both of these problems.

There has been some great feedback on the Draft Roadmap for 1.7 since Dave posted it a few days ago. A few good ones:

• Add user settings for friendly times (3 days ago) or actual times (September 17th, 2009)
• Alphabetical sorting of groups
• View content by access level
• Size quotas on files
• Hashtag support in The Wire
• Captcha refresh during registration

The 1.7 release is shaping up to be a good one! We'll be coming to a decision on the roadmap toward the end of this week, so keep your eyes open for that once it's been finalised!