Clarifications, Developers, and Building Elgg 1.7 - Week 1

This is the first of a series of updates I'll make about the progress of 1.7.

Before getting to the developments for this week, I want to communicate some things that have been said on the mailing lists and community site but not announced to the general public. Elgg 1.7 replaces 1.6.2 as the next released version of Elgg. This decision was made because the changes required to fix some of the bugs are inappropriate for a bugfix release. The tentative date for 1.7 is the end of November.

Elgg's development team is growing once again as Pedro Prez and Cash Costello join the core committers! Both have been very active in the community and are an exciting addition to the core dev team...welcome to both!

The first week held a few changes for Elgg. We drew up a list of coding standards that will be implemented over the next few weeks throughout the entire probject, both core and the bundled plugins. This document currently covers only coding styles, but will be extended to best practices. The latest version of the document can always be found in the SVN.

One of the exciting change for Elgg is the implementation of unit tests using the acurately named PHP SimpleTest. Unit tests allow automation of testing so that bugs can more easily be detected and help to prevent regressions. Nick worked on creating tests for the ElggEntity class, which is the base class for all objects, users, sites, and groups in Elgg. The next step is to create tests for specific cases in each of the subclasses.

Last week I pulled in full, correct UTF8 support for Elgg. Users who have had problems with extended or multibyte characters not correctly showing up in their database will notice the improvements. Also, this corrects a problem with searching by tags using extended characters.

The upcoming week I plan to improve debugging in Elgg by adding debug levels so that noisy debug information (SQL queries, I'm talking about you) can be filtered out, but important debug messages can still come through. I also hope to implement an API for plugins to access entities regardless of entity access level. See you on the other side.