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. >
After some more research, I just wanted to note some stats in the elgg community: There are *1348* members in the elgg *Developer *mailing list [1] There are *876* community generated 'plugins'. These range from realtime chat, to pgp based encryption, to facebook integration [2] Elgg has started to be translated into about a *dozen* different languages including Chinese [3] Whichever route GNU Social decides to take, I think it's worthwhile keeping contact with the elgg community. [1] http://groups.google.com/group/elgg-development [2] http://community.elgg.org/mod/plugins/all.php [3] http://community.elgg.org/mod/plugins/search.php?category=languages&offset=0 > * 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<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 > > >
