This is a repost of an email I sent to the development mailing list.
It’s really good to see some activity in the development community – conversation about developments and different people with different ideas contributing code is, for me, what open source is all about. When we created Elgg, we always wanted it to be open and receptive to the needs of people running the software.
We’re going to release 0.4 in mid-January, which contains some remixing of the RSS feed system exhibited on Elgg.net, as well as a restructured (and simplified) templating engine, some improvements to internationalisation, friendship and community membership moderation, and a number of bug fixes / feature improvements. This will not contain any of the improvements that Martin and his team in New Zealand are proposing; we will look at those for 0.5, as they are serious structural changes and will require more time than we have to think over and test. However, if anyone has any modifications to the existing SVN code they would like added, now is the time to submit a patch or bug to the project space on Eduforge.
We’ve agreed that from now on source code will be formatted to 80
columns and 4-space tabs. Jim, if you’re still willing to do this, would it be possible to send through a code patch? We’ll worry about the global variables for 0.5, as while I think renaming them is a good idea, the five or so data structures that we’ve talked about in another thread are really for the next version. It would be unwise to make more major changes than we’ve planned for this release – I don’t want to send something that doesn’t work out into the world. (I do, however, want to progress quickly on that topic in the thread here.)
This has been an amazing year – to start with a small system in January, which was open sourced in March, and ending here with numerous installations has been a very exciting ride. Thank you very much for sticking with us, and for contributing to Elgg’s development. With your help, next year we should reach version 1.0, and a system that I believe will genuinely be useful to a lot of people.
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