Re: [Social-discuss] The Case for Branching Elgg?

[Sean Corbett]

It certainly seems doable and the code base is very nice and straightforward; Ian and I have actually been spending time with it trying to figure out a way to get two Elgg instances we've installed on our school network to "talk to each other."  Of course I think there would need to be a lot more work done on it to attain all the goals that we've established, but it would provide a useful basis for development.

I'd personally rather write something completely new, but would be agreeable to it if that were the path we took.

Would we be able to copyright assign all the code in our fork to the FSF? If not, branching Elgg is not a viable option.

--sean corbett

On 04/03/2010 09:23 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

2010/4/2 Brett Profitt <address@hidden>

Hi,

I'm Brett Profitt, the lead developer for the Elgg project, and was
given a heads up by
Melvin Carvalho on our community site [1] that Elgg's being discussed
as a possible solution for a distributed SNS by the FSF/GNU.  Awesome!

Just wanted to throw a few things out to you guys:

* The general roadmap and focus mentioned in this thread are basically
correct.  Heavy dev time went into 1.7 to fix long standing bugs and
API oddities.  While I'm pleased with the results so far, this is a
continual process of improvement in the project.  1.8 is focusing on
interface, UI/UX, and making it easier to theme Elgg.  It's planned
for autumn 2010.  A generic roadmap covering up to Elgg 2.0 was posted
on the community site [2] and will soon be examined in depth and
posted on elgg.org.

* There's been a recent hugely positive change in Elgg's
community--not unrelated to a change in how Elgg devs approached
it--that's been really pleasant to experience.  Elgg's ecosystem has
reached critical mass where conversations are interesting and
worthwhile, the help vampires are dealt with quickly by community
regulars (and even a few recovering help vampires themselves), trac
[3] is buzzing with not only bug reports but *patches* and actual
joint development is taking place.  If you were in the community more
than 3 months ago and left, you might want to come back--it's better.

* Federalization is starting to be big deal with Elgg.  Curverider
(the primary funding company for Elgg) are discussing ways to create a
federalization plugin using openID and OAuth.  There's some working
code and it's very likely significant parts of this will be opened
once the code is reasonably distributable.  This would be a great
project for joint development with some of the distributed web app
gurus that I'm sure are lurking.

* Yeah, the G part of 'GUID' is a lie.  There's been talk about
creating truly global IDs, but this was left alone in favor of more
serious bugs and shortcomings.  Triage happens.

* Elgg is OSS--if you need to change Elgg to make it better for you,
chances are your changes will make it better for everyone.  I'm not
familiar with the full scope of your project and I know that
branches/forks are sometime necessary, but I see them closer to a last
resort than a first reaction.  Community support and interaction has
increased dramatically going into the 1.7 release and it's just
getting better.  Whether it's interaction on trac / community or
something more official like a hosted branch on code.elgg.org, I'd
love to have you guys (gender-neutral) as part of that!

I know this was a bit of an info dump, so if you have any questions or
comments, feel free to ask.  If you're up for some IRC action we're
#elgg on freenode.

Hi Brett

Many thanks for taking the time to post.  Not 100% sure which direction the GNU Social folks will go, but I'm pretty convinced by your arguments.  What I've seen of elgg so far I like.  I'd encourage GNU social to jump on board at either the 1.7 or 1.8 marks, but am unsure what will happen in the short term.  Matt Lee, the lead dev, asked me to set up a test instance which ive done here:

http://gnusocial.me/

Independently, I have 3 php devs, and we've decided to get more involved with elgg, with a view to contributing code.  Your community seems open and friendly, which is a huge plus for us.

Our area of expertise is semantic web technology and that's where we'll aim to start offering patches in that area.

I've already located a security vulnerability with the sha1mbox ... if you take a nick and add @hotmail.com @gmail.com @yahoo.com etc then take an sha1sum you can often reverse engineer the email address, so that's something we can fix up too. 

W3C is also known to be looking for a social networking site for their home page, so if I can get elgg to a state where it's pretty standards compliant, hopefully we can push that forward.

I've bookmarked #elgg on freenode, so perhaps we can continue conversations there.  I'm looking forward to a hopefully great collaboration!

Best wishes
Melvin
 

Thanks,
Brett

1. http://community.elgg.org
2. http://community.elgg.org/mod/groups/topicposts.php?topic=453453&group_guid=212846
(4th comment down...comment permalinks are in trunk!)
3. http://trac.elgg.org

----
Brett Profitt
Elgg Lead Developer

Skype: brett.profitt
Twitter: http://twitter.com/brettprofitt