Elgg 1.8.3 released

Less than a month after the previous release, Elgg 1.8.3 is ready for download. We closed over 60 tickets in making this release. Enhancements and new features include

• A white list for ajax actions. Developers, it is important that you use elgg_register_ajax_view() to register a view as being available for ajax.
• Group-specific search on a group's profile page
• Support for Etag headers for icons, JavaScript, and CSS files.
• Deprecation notices are now limited to admin users
• A server information page that makes it easier to figure out what version of PHP you are running and where PHP logging is located.

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Elgg 1.8.2 released!

We are pleased to release the 1.8.2 version of Elgg. We closed over 60 bug tickets in making this release. Bugs that were fixed include

• Creation of default widgets when users register
• Insertion of a very small thumbnail by the embed plugin
• Missing links to site pages in the footer
• Incorrect activity filtering
• URL creation involving usernames with non-ASCII characters
• User picker display raw HTML rather than a list of users

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The November London Elgg Meetup

We are pleased to have a guest blog post from Laura Gill of Surevine. She coordinated the first London Elgg meetup. Here is her report of what happened for those of us who could not attend:

The first (of what we hope will be many!) London Elgg Meetup took place in November, at the Silicon Roundabout in East London. The event was set up to bring together developers, contributors and users of Elgg, along with anyone else who wanted to find out more.

The night was a great success – we had a video link from Cash Costello talking about the status of Elgg development and his upcoming book; an introduction to Elgg 1.8 from Kevin Jardine; looked at “Elgg-shaped circles” with John Atherton; had an insight into Elgg in Healthcare from Malcolm Newbury and a reminder from Alec Muffett that “a platform is for life, not just for Christmas”!

The locally-brewed pale ale flowed, mountains of pizza were eaten… and most importantly, some great conversations were shared.

The slides and video from the night can be found here http://www.slideshare.net/LdnElggMeet.

A big thanks goes to Surevine for sponsoring the event, Lucila Campos and Susana Cipriota from Condiminds for invaluable tips and advice on how to arrange the night, and of course Brett Profitt and Cash Costello for helping me to make this event such a success.

Elgg 1.8.1 released

Elgg 1.8.1 is now available for download at http://www.elgg.org/. 197 tickets were closed between 1.8.0 and this release so a lot of work has gone into this version. A summary change log is available here.

Several developers made contributions to this release:

We also had many people report bugs on our bug tracker. Thank you!

Finally, several community members volunteered to test this version before release:

• Starphysique
• R.Cerceau
• Randy Brito
• Purus
• Juho Jaakkola
• imoni
• gastre

Elgg's New Menu System: Dynamic menus

This is the second post in a series on Elgg's new menu system. Last time I explained how to register a menu item during initialization and just before the menu is rendered. In this post, I explain how to take advantage of the just-in-time registration to create dynamic menus.

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Elgg's New Menu System: Registering a menu item

One of the bigger changes in Elgg 1.8 is its new menu system. Previously, Elgg had distinct functions and methodologies for its different menus. To add to the site menu, add_menu() was used. Adding to the sidebar menu required a called to add_submenu_item(). The user hover menu worked through view extensions.

There was discussion in the Elgg developers Google group about creating a consistent naming convention for the functions. That discussion quickly progressed to a redesign of the menu system with a single API for all menus. This is the first in a series of posts on this new menu API.

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Elgg 1.8: Sticky Forms

You have just spent the last hour writing a blog post. It is a devasting rebuttal of every argument that your blogospheric archnemsis has devised. You know that everyone who reads it will be in awe of your logic, your persuasive power, and your grasp of grammar. The mental image of he_who_should_not_be_named crying at his utter defeat fills you with a deep sense of satisfaction.

You click the submit button and scream in horror as you see the error message about the missing title. There staring you in the face is a blank text box where your masterpiece was supposed to be. The back button brings you no satisfaction.

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Updating 1.7 Plugins for 1.8 While Still Using 1.7

Plugin authors, there are a few steps that you can take to update your plugins for 1.8 before it is released. Completing these steps will make it just that much easier to be ready for 1.8.

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Elgg 1.8: Including CSS and JavaScript

Update: we've made some changes to the functions in this blog post. We wanted to make it easier for one plugin to include a JavaScript library and another to use it. The post has been updated.

Development on Elgg 1.8 is moving along at a good clip. One of the new features that I have appreciated as I update the plugins are the new functions for including JavaScript and CSS files. In Elgg 1.0-1.7 including an external CSS file is done through extending the metatags view. Not exactly intuitive! It also means that if I have two plugins including the same file, the file is included twice in the HTML <head>. This all changes with Elgg 1.8.

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Improving the Community Site: Developer Notifications

The newest feature that we have added to the Elgg Community site is plugin developer notifications. You can now receive an email whenever one of your favorite developers uploads a new plugin or releases a new version of a plugin.

To use this new feature, go to your notifictions settings page and turn on notifications for Everyone you are following. Then find the developers that you want to keep updated on and follow them.