Hi, I'm Brett Profitt, the lead developer for the Elgg project, and was given a heads up by Melvin Carvalho on our community site [1] that Elgg's being discussed as a possible solution for a distributed SNS by the FSF/GNU. Awesome!
Just wanted to throw a few things out to you guys: * The general roadmap and focus mentioned in this thread are basically correct. Heavy dev time went into 1.7 to fix long standing bugs and API oddities. While I'm pleased with the results so far, this is a continual process of improvement in the project. 1.8 is focusing on interface, UI/UX, and making it easier to theme Elgg. It's planned for autumn 2010. A generic roadmap covering up to Elgg 2.0 was posted on the community site [2] and will soon be examined in depth and posted on elgg.org. * There's been a recent hugely positive change in Elgg's community--not unrelated to a change in how Elgg devs approached it--that's been really pleasant to experience. Elgg's ecosystem has reached critical mass where conversations are interesting and worthwhile, the help vampires are dealt with quickly by community regulars (and even a few recovering help vampires themselves), trac [3] is buzzing with not only bug reports but *patches* and actual joint development is taking place. If you were in the community more than 3 months ago and left, you might want to come back--it's better. * Federalization is starting to be big deal with Elgg. Curverider (the primary funding company for Elgg) are discussing ways to create a federalization plugin using openID and OAuth. There's some working code and it's very likely significant parts of this will be opened once the code is reasonably distributable. This would be a great project for joint development with some of the distributed web app gurus that I'm sure are lurking. * Yeah, the G part of 'GUID' is a lie. There's been talk about creating truly global IDs, but this was left alone in favor of more serious bugs and shortcomings. Triage happens. * Elgg is OSS--if you need to change Elgg to make it better for you, chances are your changes will make it better for everyone. I'm not familiar with the full scope of your project and I know that branches/forks are sometime necessary, but I see them closer to a last resort than a first reaction. Community support and interaction has increased dramatically going into the 1.7 release and it's just getting better. Whether it's interaction on trac / community or something more official like a hosted branch on code.elgg.org, I'd love to have you guys (gender-neutral) as part of that! I know this was a bit of an info dump, so if you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask. If you're up for some IRC action we're #elgg on freenode. Thanks, Brett 1. http://community.elgg.org 2. http://community.elgg.org/mod/groups/topicposts.php?topic=453453&group_guid=212846 (4th comment down...comment permalinks are in trunk!) 3. http://trac.elgg.org ---- Brett Profitt Elgg Lead Developer Skype: brett.profitt Twitter: http://twitter.com/brettprofitt
