How to make Elgg 1.7 the most stable yet

Borrowing from Apple's Snow Leopard, Elgg 1.7 will ship with 0 new features. After feedback from users like Chris and discussions with the core dev team, we have decided to tackle some bugs that have been found in Elgg core in order to improve Elgg core itself. Though we are excited about the new features we have planned for Elgg, it is agreed that current development time will be better spent making Elgg Core as solid and bug-free as possible.

To that end, we have postponed most of the Elgg 1.7 roadmap until Elgg 1.8. The core dev team will spend the next 6-8 weeks improving core, standardising functions and code styles, fixing bugs, and writing unit tests for core features. In addition to core programmatic changes, we will be refactoring certain plugins like groups. In the hopes of maintaining higher coding practices, we will also publish official coding standards and style guidelines for both core and plugins.

This is a great step for Elgg because it will make plugin building, site deployment, and core itself easier to develop, maintain, and use. When all developers use the same coding standards and styles, code will be easier to browse and read, and so to debug. When all get_*() functions take the same parameters in the same order and react the same way to empty results, errors, and success, more time can be spent developing instead of looking up which order to send parameters.

As Elgg continues to grow, these are qualities that are absolutely required to ensure the software succeeds.