Elgg 1.7 development, Elgg Users Google Group, and ElggCamp BA

Greetings all!

Sorry for the delay in posting--I've been busy in both my developer and personal life and haven't had a chance to sit down over the weekend to write a wrap-up. I've received quite a few emails from people asking after 1.7. No need to worry: development of 1.7 is going well and I'm hopeful to have a developer's preview release out the door by the end of this week, with 1.7 final out sometime in December.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Elgg 1.7 will have no new features, but will focus on standardizing the API, correcting long-standing bugs, and generally making sure that Elgg is a solid platform to develop on. Some of the major bugs that are corrected in already include:

• Rest and services API work now (Thanks Cash Costello!)
• File storage based upon GUID instead of username
• Unit tests added (Yes, this could be considered a feature, but YAY UNIT TESTS!!!!)
• Availability and order of parameters in get_entities*() functions normalised
• UTF8 support added in the database

As I said on the developer's mailing list, even though the new functions will be available for developers, the old functions will still work. There seems to have been some confusion, misinformation and FUD spread around concerning this point so I'll make it again: Elgg 1.7's API will be backward compatible with Elgg 1.6. Feel free to quote me on that. :)

In an effort to help answer the question "What changed in this version of Elgg?" we have started listing major bugfixes and changes in the CHANGES.txt file. It's a good read!

Moving along, this is just a reminder that as of November 2nd, 2009 the Elgg Users Google Group has closed to new members and messages. Existing content is still available to read, but please use the Community Site for all user troubleshooting and discussion. Please read the origina announcement for more information.

Now to the fun: ElggCamp Buenos Aires! Pedro Prez with Keetup Development, Susana Cipriota with Condiminds.com, and the folks from farmsphere.com have organized ElggCamp Buenos Aires on November 19th, 2009. Following ElggCamp Boston this past August, I'm really looking forward to heading to BA and meeting some of the Elgg users and developers in the southern hemisphere! Not to mention it's spring there, and a chilly autumn here in Ohio.

The ElggCamp BA site has loads more information that Google Translate can help with if your Spanish is rusty. If you happen to be in or near Buenos Aires, stop in!