Interface changes

Due to feedback from extensiveusability testing (both formal and the informal feedback we’ve received by running elgg.net since November), the Elgg interface is due to change massively. Dave already posted a sneak peek, and we’ve since got it working on our development site.

Here’s the bad news: we’ve changed it so extensively that themes from 0.2 downwards are incompatible. The good news is that you don’t have 14 menu items whizzing across the top and however many down the side. The result is a system that is much easier to use and understand, with four main menu items across the top:

– Your Profile
– Your Weblog
– Your Files
– Your Network

A set of submenus allows you to find all the existing functionality in a logical way. This has allowed us to do things like split ‘friends’ and ‘friends of’ in a far less confusing way, as well as generally spring clean the code and close the last few remaining gaps in our internationalisation dictionary in preparation for the next release.

We’re dropping a wysiwyg editor for now, but you’ll notice that pasted URLs now automatically turn into live links (unless you’ve used them in an HTML link tag, obviously). And hey, we’re gaining an admin panel and a whole lot of extra functionality from the last release, so please don’t feel too hard done by.


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