Software update: Elgg 1.7

Elgg is an open source social networking platform that uses Apache, MySQL 5+ and PHP 5.2+. Options include blogging, file sharing, social bookmarking and importing content from Twitter or Facebook, for example. For more information, we refer you to this page and the documentation can be accessed via this page to be found. The developers have released Elgg 1.7 and provided the following announcement:

Elgg 1.7 released!

I am pleased to announce Elgg 1.7 has been released–download it from the Elgg downloads page!

For 1.7, the core team focused development on improving the core API, correcting long-standing bugs, and enhancing security. During the development of 1.7, we have had an unprecedented amount of community involvement in trac. In fact, over 250 issues were resolved in trac for this release!

Much of the development time was spent improving the core API to make Elgg a stable platform for development. As I have mentioned, this means that there are very few new features in Elgg 1.7–most of the improvements are behind the scenes and will be visible only to developers.

Some of the larger changes in 1.7 include:

• Proper UTF8 support in the database — This allows developers to use MySQL’s native string functions in queries
• A new data directories layout to work with standard filesystems
• Full text search
• A new core API for retrieving entities
• A functional REST API
• unit tests

I’d like to personally thank the following people for their contributions to 1.7:

• Cash Costello for endless testing, developing, bug reporting, and feedback
• Justin Richer, Nathan Rackliffe, and Tom Read from MITER for the basics of the new search
• Mike Lietz, Patrick McSweeny, and Kevin McCollough from eTech Ohio for bug reports and patches
• thomas, sammykanan, gv, coldtrick, jaakko.naakka, markharding, milan, and twall for testing against SVN, submitting trac tickets, and submitting patches

This list is by no means all-inclusive, so for anyone I mistakenly left out, thank you too!

With more people joining the effort to test, to patch, and to develop, Elgg is really gaining momentum. This is absolutely great news and I’m very excited about what the future holds! The increase in developers has, however, demonstrated that we need to change how our SVN repositories are organized. To simplify the development process, the separate core and extensions SVN repositories and tracs will be merged into a single repository and trac system. The SVN repositories will be updated to a standard branches, tags, and trunk layout to allow concurrent development and support for multiple versions of Elgg.

To implement these changes, Elgg’s SVN and trac will be unavailable until March 3rd, 2010 at 9:00am EST. Watch this blog space for information on how to switch to the new SVN layout.

The road to 1.7 has been an exciting one for me, and I hope that 1.8 is just as interesting!