We’ve released Elgg v0.301 in order to fix the bugs causing problems at the start of the week and add a couple of usability features. Our internationalisation isn’t quite complete – it’s been pointed out that on some systems the dates don’t change language. We are using setlocale(LC_TIME) to attempt to force the system to return times in your language, but that doesn’t seem to be working; all suggestions received with undying thanks.

At any rate, if you’re wanting an English language Elgg, this release should work for you. If you’re wanting a foreign language Elgg, there may be a small amount of tweaking left to do. We apologise for this – as well as to our brave translators who have had to cope with us changing the language template file every five minutes – and have given ourselves another week in order to get it right.

A quick final note about installation: I’ve mentioned it in the INSTALL file, but this is really the number one reason installs fail. You must must must must must remember to upload the .htaccess file, which will likely be hidden by default if you’re unzipping the package on a Linux, Unix or Mac machine. If your weblog, file and profile pages aren’t showing up, the file isn’t there or mod_rewrite isn’t enabled on your Apache installation.

Thanks, enjoy, and have a great weekend everybody!

Have a big, pink bunny.

Writely is a cross-browser (except Safari for some reason), AJAX, collaborative, tag-enabled wordprocessor. It’s pretty fantastic from what I’ve seen so far, and opens the door for a pile of similar products. I would imagine we’ll see a browser-based Microsoft Office within a year.

On reflection, the thing I really like about this is that it unbuckles documents and applications from individual computers – so rather than lug my laptop everywhere I go, in the future perhaps I’ll just log in to my applications from terminals at my destination. The only thing missing is a standard way for all these elements – web applications, web storage, your e-portfolio – to talk to each other. For example, there might be a standard for areas of storage space, which the word processor might use to save your document. There might be another one for aggregating tagged documents from all over the place and adding them to your portfolio. Perhaps everyone would authenticate using a generalised system like OpenID. Each application would be on a different server, your storage space would be on another server again – effectively your computer would now be a cloud of applications and data spanning continents.

Which is all well and good, but I wouldn’t say no to a local backup. One of the nice things about having everything on one computer is that you own it: once an application has made it from CD to hard disk, you dictate how it’s going to be used. Similarly for data files. If everything’s on a network, on computers owned by companies rather than individuals, rights issues start getting fuzzier. Do I really want people snooping my data, or disabling parts of my applications depending on where or who I am? No, but that’s a real possibility. Even with e-portfolios, the key really has to be your ability to own your space outside the context of the application that created it. (I say this while being completely aware that Elgg doesn’t quite do this yet.)

I’m not happy about centralised systems in general, and I think as more and more applications spread to the web, there’s probably something to be said for a personalised web server with back-end database – not for sharing pages with the world, although that’s useful too, but for downloading platform-independent applications and running them wherever you want. When this happens it’s not just a case of heading over to writely.com if you want to do some word processing; you can load your data there, but you can also load it into six thousand other word processor installs on the Internet, or the one on your local notebook. But who will write such a platform when it’s so much more profitable to make everyone go to the same place?

… Seb Paquet’s icon cracks me up every time. “I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!” *happy sigh*

Thank you. The technical director will now return to his hole.

I love using the admin panel. There’s a sense of satisfaction in knowing exactly how many users and communities you have on a system, finding out who’s pottering about (although it won’t tell me what you’re doing, privacy fans), checking out how many weblog posts there have been this week and so on. This could be developed further – it would be trivial to write in a ‘weblog posts by day’ graph, for example, or ‘logins by hour’, or ‘users who logged in six months ago and haven’t bothered to come back’. All of those things have their uses.

There are a handful of things I’m still worried about; will users see the ‘account settings’ tab? Will they realise that this is where they go to change their theme? Will the dubious content flagging system be effective? Only time will tell.

For now, though, I’ll be sitting here reloading the user stats page …

Inevitably for such a large release, there have been a number of bugs spotted. These are all very minor, but put together may affect your Elgg experience – therefore an improved Elgg v0.301 will leave the building before the end of the week.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your delectation and enjoyment:

{{file:1459}}
Elgg 0.3 final release

This is still undergoing testing prior to a proper upload on Eduforge, but I’m uploading it in the hope that a few people will download it and give us their feedback. Largely, at this stage, we’re wanting to know: is there anything that doesn’t work for you?

These rainy autumn (is it really autumn already?) days are really conducive to sitting down and doing some serious work – which is just as well, because I’ve had not a small amount to do. I’ve got these great overhead desk lights, and my room feels like a warm little refuge from the cold world outside. My iRiver is beside me, churning out music I love, and altogether it’s pretty pleasant. If you have to be in front of a computer on a Sunday, it might as well be like this.

In a moment I’ll go downstairs and make myself a cup of tea, possibly construct myself some pasta or something for lunch. If I’m bad I’ll nip round to the corner shop and brave the rain for a slice of cake or a pastry.

What are your office comforts? What keeps you working?

Oh, and here’s an {{file:1450}}, which should give you a better idea of the extent of the changes and improvements we’ve made.

One of the problems with the RSS feeds is that, for security reasons, they only syndicate public objects. We’d love to change this, but an issue is how do you authenticate an RSS reader into Elgg? It won’t remember a set of cookies, and I’m not happy about HTTP authentication over the URL string, so …

Hmm. Any ideas?

Dave and I have now been collaborating on Elgg for what seems like forever – unbelievably, it’s only been around 18 months. However, the amount of work we’ve put into it, the thought and time, designs and redesigns, ideas and conversations have basically been our worlds since we started.

One of my big regrets is the version numbering. When we released Elgg as an open source product in March, we decided to go with version 0.1 alpha, as internally we hadn’t really used distinctly numbered versions – however, it had been under development since July. Hence while the release coming out on Monday might be called 0.3, in fact it’s closer to 0.8. It’s been a few months since 0.2, and we really believe the product has come on in leaps and bounds.

I’ve previously talked a little about the navigation system, but probably the biggest change is the introduction of gettext for internationalisation. If you don’t have gettext on your server, not to worry, you’ll still get English text – if you do, we’ll be releasing the dictionary file and building up a database of different languages you’ll be able to plug in.

Another is the admin panel. You’ll be able to manage users in ways not really possible without direct access to the back-end database before. If you need to increase file quotas, ban a user or change someone’s username, you’ll be able to do those things. You’ll also be able to bulk add users to a system. (If anyone has any file formats they’d really like to see us support for this, please let us know – you may be too late for this release, but there will be a 3.1 to follow.)

You’ll be seeing changes to elgg.net on Monday or Tuesday to reflect the new navigation structure. We think you’ll agree that it’s a colossal stride forwards, and we’ve got some exciting announcements lined up for the next couple of months.

I keep thinking to myself how different this is to the two of us sitting in Edinburgh, in a damp office with a window that didn’t close and the constant smell of chips wafting upwards from the canteen below, chatting about e-learning and web applications (amongst other things). It’s been fantastic working with Dave on this, and there are very exciting times ahead; I’m very much looking forward to the future. I hope you’ll look at the new release and agree we make a good team.