2010/4/2 Brett Profitt <[email protected]> > 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. >
Hi Brett Many thanks for taking the time to post. Not 100% sure which direction the GNU Social folks will go, but I'm pretty convinced by your arguments. What I've seen of elgg so far I like. I'd encourage GNU social to jump on board at either the 1.7 or 1.8 marks, but am unsure what will happen in the short term. Matt Lee, the lead dev, asked me to set up a test instance which ive done here: http://gnusocial.me/ Independently, I have 3 php devs, and we've decided to get more involved with elgg, with a view to contributing code. Your community seems open and friendly, which is a huge plus for us. Our area of expertise is semantic web technology and that's where we'll aim to start offering patches in that area. I've already located a security vulnerability with the sha1mbox ... if you take a nick and add @hotmail.com @gmail.com @yahoo.com etc then take an sha1sum you can often reverse engineer the email address, so that's something we can fix up too. W3C is also known to be looking for a social networking site for their home page, so if I can get elgg to a state where it's pretty standards compliant, hopefully we can push that forward. I've bookmarked #elgg on freenode, so perhaps we can continue conversations there. I'm looking forward to a hopefully great collaboration! Best wishes Melvin > > Thanks, > Brett > > 1. http://community.elgg.org > 2. > http://community.elgg.org/mod/groups/topicposts.php?topic=453453&group_guid=212846 > (4th<http://community.elgg.org/mod/groups/topicposts.php?topic=453453&group_guid=212846%0A%284th>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 > > >
