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During the week I did a little number crunching to find out what has been going on with Elgg since we launched v1.0 around 8 weeks ago. Without going into much depth, the stats are impressive.
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Reposted from Dave's personal blog
 Some of the Elgg team were down in Brighton consulting at the University of Brighton to work out a strategy for migrating their 50,000 user, classic Elgg install, to the new Elgg code base. We also discussed some cool custom developments.
We had the Brighton Elgg meet, where we met some cool people doing interesting work, some with Elgg. Ben fell in love with Brighton and both he and Marcus were digging this co-working space. I have to admit, it does have a decent tech scene compared to most parts of the UK.
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 We are pleased to announce that this year's Elgg conference will take place on Dec 1st in Brighton, England. As some followers of Elgg will know, we had to postpone this event earlier in the year due to some unforeseen circumstances.
We are still working on a schedule for the day but wanted to let those interested know the date as soon as possible in order for it to be marked into their diaries.
It will follow our usual format: presentations, demonstrations and then a panel Q&A to wrap things up before heading to a venue in the town for some beer and food.
If there is enough interest, we might look to hold a code-a-thon the following day.
If you would like to attend this year's event, please head over to the event page and register.
If you are using Elgg and would like to showcase your work in one of the demonstration slots, please get in touch: info@elgg.com.
We look forward to seeing some of you there.
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 We are pleased to announce that the new Elgg community has launched today. When we released Elgg v1.0 towards the tail end of August, we opened two google groups for those interested in Elgg to use, however, from the feedback we received, it quickly became evident that those using Elgg were requiring something better suited to a real community environment, so, we built Community @ elgg.org.
The purpose of this community is to pull together those interested in, using and developing for Elgg. We hope it will become a vibrant site where we can all help each other get the most out of Elgg.
You will find tutorials, documentation, specific groups, community contributed plugins and themes and space to create your own niche support environments.
Hope to see you over at http://community.elgg.org
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We are pleased to announce that Elgg v1.0 has now left the building and is available to download in two flavours, the core engine and the full Elgg package.
The core engine is for those wishing to build up their own network from the beginning, whereas the full Elgg package is the core Elgg engine plus the following plugins pre-loaded: blogs, files, pages, bookmarks, messageboard, status, TinyMCE and private messages.
For more information you can check out the new elgg.org website, and if you are keen to get involved, join one of the two mailing lists. There is a mailing list for developers to talk tech and another one for Elgg users. There is also a demo installation available.
We would like to extend a big thank you to all of those Elgg users who helped us to test this latest version of Elgg over the past few months, we appreciate it.
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Over the past few weeks some Elgg users and developers have been helping us beta test Elgg v1.0 on both the code and interface side of things. This has been a worthwhile process with the beta testers picking up on a few things that we had missed out/overlooked. All in all, feedback has been positive and we are working to implement some of the suggested changes. I would like to say thanks to those of you who have given up some of your valuable time to help with the testing, it is appreciated.
If you are waiting for the official release, it will happen once we have completed this testing phase.
In other news, this report highlights Elgg as a rising star in the arena of Open Source CMS platforms. This is good news as we look to continue developing a state-of-the-art social platform.
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One of Elgg's largest user bases is education, and it's been used in schools and universities for years. In order to serve this community, we have established an educational advisory group made up of individuals who have been pushing the boundaries of open source and social networking within that sector. Their main role is to help us make sure that Elgg is fully equipped to be the best solution for anyone who wants to create a social networking/community space within their school, college or university.
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As we near the launch of Elgg v1.0, I thought I would start a little mini blog series on the different ways people are using Elgg.
There are three main areas where Elgg is gaining real traction; education, business Intranets and custom social networks.
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One of the many things that excites me about the new Elgg is relationships between entities. In the new codebase it is possible to create any type of relationship between any type of entity.
Entity A is a 'friend' of Entity B
Entity C is a 'topic' of Entity D
Entity F created a 'share' relationship between Entity C and Entity G
and so on.
That in itself is pretty cool as it means we are never constrained by pre-determined relationships, for example, no more friend tables in the database.
This steps up a level when we add metadata to these relationships. In doing so, we can begin to effectively weight the relationship and hopefully use the resultant data to enhance the experience, making sure users are getting the information that is relevant to them.
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No matter how long you have worked on a project, letting new users in for the first time is always daunting.
Over the past week or so we have invited in a first round of beta testers for the next generation of Elgg. Although we were nervous, it was the right thing to do.
This is always the problem, do you let users see a new product that is not quite finished or do you just explain it is work in progress and get them in early? We went for the latter, for the simple reason that, while the new Elgg is not quite ready, having users in early makes for a better development process.
The first group in have been great at testing for bugs, offering suggestions on the various features and really giving this project a sense of community involvement.
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