We’ve just made Elgg 0.7 Release Candidate 1 available to download from the usual place.
We’ve actually been having a hard time trying to remember all the changes that have made it into this release. There are a lot! So rather than a full summary, here’s a sample:
Improved navigation and themes.
See that toolbar at the top of the screen? It now persists across all themes, creating a consistent navigation experience. It’s easier to create site-wide themes, too: all you have to do is drop them into your mod/template/templates folder and they’ll be picked up by the system. This means we can start making themes available for download, and all you have to do is slot them in.
The structure of the CSS and pageshell are now much easier to theme – the stylesheet in particular is around a third of the size of the previous one, while being significantly more flexible.
Photo galleries.
File folders can now have types; one of the types that comes out of the box is the user photo gallery. You can already see this in action on elgg.net, but it’s available for you to use out of the box in 0.7.
Improved wysiwyg editor.
It’s now much harder to navigate away from a page and lose your changes; there’s also a ‘preview’ button in the toolbar, which a lot of you have been asking for.
APIs a-go-go.
There’s still some work to do in order to make the plugin API truly robust – more on this later – but it’s easier than ever before to create fully workable plugins. You already know about Amazon S3 and Akismet, but third-party plugins also exist for forums, tag autocomplete, friendly URLs for weblog posts and more.
A support community you can count on.
We will shortly be re-releasing the main Elgg.org site; another announcement will be made when this happens. This will be your one stop shop for plugins, themes, installation support, development discussion and more. We’re excited about the update, and can’t wait to let you in!
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