Weekly wrap-up: Elgg Demo Site details, Elgg 1.6.1 bugfixes, and Updated Collections

Greetings all!

It's been another busy week with Elgg. We've pulled in quite a few patches preparing for a 1.6.1 release early next week that will fix some bugs discovered in 1.6. Also, we've established a good base for the Demo site and I've been working on updating the Access Collections for 1.7+.

First, there have been many requests for details about the Demo site. Briefly, the Demo site is running core Elgg from the current SVN that will become 1.6.1. A few users have noticed some cosmetic changes and incorrectly attribute this to the theme--These changes are due to updates to the wire and to the activity stream. The activity stream used on Demo is in SVN and the updated Wire plugin will be put in SVN to be released with 1.7.

As for the plugins, the demo site uses all core plugins, with the exception of the awesome photo plugin Tidy Pics and a language tweak to change "friends" to "following."

As I said, we've pulled in a few bug fixes for problems people have encountered with 1.6 and will be releasing 1.6.1 early next week. In addition to the two bugs I talked about last week, Dave committed a fix for the friends' activities to not displaying properly, and I committed a fix for group discussions to honor the default site access.

For some new and exciting features, I've been working on a replacement for Access Collections. Through feedback we've found that most people don't use--indeed don't even know about--Access Collections and usually try to use groups for collaborative and collective content. To this, I've started developing a collections plugin that serves as an aggregation of all content marked with a certain access level. Developers, you'll be interested in the new get_entities_from_access_collection() and list_entities_from_access_collection() functions. End users, you'll be interested in Elgg 1.7 ;)

That's all here! I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Also, still looking to meet up with some folks at the jQuery conference in Boston next weekend. Give me a shout if you're going!