You’ve probably seen the news post announcing communities. It’s really exciting, and we’ve been meaning to do this for a really long time, but the logistics – more than any other part of the system – have been daunting to say the least.

It’s there now, and I thought some of you might appreciate a quick tour from the developer, so here goes:

New sidebar blocks

Moderator Of: This displays all communities you own, and is hidden if you haven’t created any.

Member Of: Displays all the communities you are a member of.

As with the ‘friends’ panel, only the first eight are shown; you’ve got to click on the “Communities” or “Owned Communities” links to get a full list.

Joining / Leaving a Community

You can join or leave a community by clicking the little icon you’ve been using to add friends, next to the community’s name. I’m aware this is probably confusing, so that graphic will be changing for communities.

Finding communities

Communities are stored internally more or less like people; you can see community weblog posts on the ‘all weblog posts’ page (assuming they haven’t been access restricted), you’ll see posts and community files in the search results.

Which brings me to …

Communities have weblogs and file repositories

If you’re a member of a community, all of that community’s weblog posts will appear on your friends list. To post to a community weblog, visit its ‘community weblog’ page and click the “Click here to post to this weblog” link.

Uploading to a community’s file repository works just like uploading to your own repository, although obviously you need to navigate to that community’s repository pages first. The community’s file quota will be depleted as opposed to your own.

Access restrictions

You can restrict weblog posts, files, profile items etc so that they’re only readable by the members of a community you’re a member of. That isn’t just restricted to things within that community – any weblog post, file, etc, can be restricted to the members of communities you’re a part of.

Creating communities

To create a community, go to your ‘communities’ page; enter its name and a short name that will be part of its website address (i.e., elgg.net/shortname). The community will appear in your ‘moderator of’ sidebar box and you’ll be made into its first member.

Customising communities you own

If you then navigate to its main profile screen as if it were a user, you’ll see three useful links: “Click here to edit this profile”, “Upload / edit site pictures for this community” and “Change this community’s name”. I’ll leave you to guess what they do. It’s not hard.

More to come …

I haven’t finished building yet – templating is conspicuous by its absence for the time being, but it’ll be there within a matter of days. As the news item suggests, there will also be the ability to restrict membership access to the community itself.

And beyond?

We’re still looking at more features – as ever, the roadmap is a good place to look to see where we’re going.

Communities are 3/4 the way there; a little more work tomorrow and the basics will be in place. Currently you cannot create your own community, but feel free to join Elgg Features by clicking the button next to the community name, just as you would add someone to your friends list. The button for communities will change eventually.

Once you’ve joined you’ll find you can post to the community weblog and upload to the file repository. All community postings will also show up on your friends page.

Remember, this is very much in testing still; tomorrow once I know it’s stable I’ll make an announcement in the news weblog.

iTunes 4.9 will support podcasting. That probably signals that the technology has gone mainstream.

Elgg is, of course, a perfect podcasting platform; upload MP3 files to your file repository, tag them with a common keyword (eg “podcast”) and the RSS feed for that tag is your podcast feed. We’ve tested the system with all major podcasting software, although the proof will obviously be in the pudding; perhaps one of us needs to actually start a podcast here.

This post partially serves as a test that the new post-to-weblog interface is functioning correctly, and partially as a notification that it exists.

It’s part of a bigger whole and – like everything else – in alpha, but you’ll now see a “click here to post to this weblog” link on your public weblog page. No more clicking through to the menu, and new users won’t see that daunting white screen. (There’s nothing worse than a blank page, is there?)

We’ve got major changes to come – watch this space …

It’s been a little while since I’ve updated my weblog here, although I read the ‘all weblog posts’ screen every day. I’ve had a lot of fun watching people come in, and we’ve now got over 500 members on this installation.

Speaking of installations, we’ve deliberately not mentioned Apcala much here. The division is as follows: Elgg is the software, and happens to also be the name of this installation, which is the home of the software development and learning related discussion. Obviously you’re free to talk about whatever you like on your Elgg account, but that’s the nominal concept we had in mind.

Apcala, meanwhile, is a site that happens to use Elgg as its engine. It’s not related to learning itself, and most of the users are actual undergraduate students and teenagers. I keep my personal weblog over there, and try to talk about Elgg over here (often from the news and system development weblogs). There is absolutely no reason why you would need an account on both, or even why that would be desirable, but some people have and that’s fine. I want to make clear that officially, Apcala is unrelated to the Elgg project, except in the sense that we’re getting usage information from it that helps us develop the software.

This weekend Dave and I discussed some of the future developments for Elgg – specifically the oft-requested ‘communities’ function. The vision we have in mind hasn’t been done before (but will, I’m sure, be duplicated elsewhere), and we should have it up for you by the end of the month as per our roadmap; I’ll then be showing it off in Denmark at the end of the month, and Dave will be taking it to Canada. It’s an exciting time for us, and we’d like to thank you for taking an interest.