Brett Profitt just announced the release of Elgg 1.7.4 via the Elgg blogs. While the majority of changes in this release are bugfixes, there are two notable changes in Elgg 1.7.4 related to Twitter and user validation.

Brett writes about the new features:

1. Twitter Services has been upgrade to use oAuth and extended for easier support of 3rd party plugins.  For users, this means The Wire will post to Twitter again.  For developers, this means you can easily integrate Twitter in your plugins.  Because of changes to Twitter's API, this requires additional configuration for both the admins and users.  This API was originally a 1.8 feature so documentation is still sparse, but watch the blog for a post on how to write plugins that can tweet!
2. Added a new admin section to manage unvalidated users.  A very common problem for new users on Elgg sites is validating their account through email.  To help with this we've added a admin section so admin users can manually validate accounts, delete accounts, or resend the validation links.

The latest version of Elgg is available from Elgg's download page.

I'm a big fan of Elgg, a free and open source social software that allows you to build your own social networks.  So it is with great surprise to me that I haven't really covered a lot of news about Elgg here at CMSReport.com.  Take a look at a recent post by Dave Tosh for some examples of the latest Elgg powered sites on the Web.  If that's not enough for you to judge how well Elgg can run social media sites...than Dave has more examples of Elgg sites to show you.

Snapshot of Elgg.org

Elgg 1.5 is the latest version of the software with download links available at the official Elgg site.  Hopefully, we'll find more time to cover Elgg in the coming months.

Even for The Register, not a very long article but it does ask some important questions.  The article, Welcome to the world of collaboration by stealth, suggests via questions that collaboration is bigger than the IT department.

Because it involves software, probably the IT department's. But is IT equipped for the task? And does it want the responsibility? Collaboration is a human process, in essence, so surely the buck stops somewhere else - even if IT provides a number of enabling tools.

The article then discusses that collaboration tools may be best implemented "by a few people at a time".  In other words, perhaps the first time social publishing systems are introduced in your organization, it may be best not to implement it through traditional enterprise software.  The article even suggests that Facebook would be a good first collaboration tool. I personally wouldn't go that far (or rather short sighted) with Facebook, however.

Tools such as Drupal, Elgg, or Alfresco are good tools to introduce the the troops to collaboration applications.  You can easily have your workers collaborating though IT without having go full force on an enterprise solution to collaboration.  The topic of CMS and collaboration in the enterprise is something we'll be spending a lot of time on in the coming months.

Although I had a lot of fun this summer, I allowed a lot of commitments to slip though my fingers.  Many of those commitments were made here at CMS Report.  The following is a list of promises that I haven't kept.  My apologies to those that had expected more.

• I never got around to reviewing Barrie M. North's Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (link via Amazon Associate).  My apologies to the author as well as the publicist.

• After all the experimentation and posts I did before the official release of Drupal 6, I never got around to discussing my experiences with the CMS after Drupal 6.0 was officially released.  For now, let me just say that it has been an experience running a site on Drupal 6 with some of the more essential third-party modules still under development (Views, Panels, Subscriptions, etc).

• Elgg's Dave Tosh and I still need to complete that email interview on Elgg 1.0.  Dave was busy and was at first the one slow to respond to emails.  However, during the past two weeks, I've been the been the busy one and the ball is still on my side of the court.

• After two years, I and Deane Barker (Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive) still need to get together for a geek chat.  Depending on the time, I think we owe each other a beer or a cup of coffee.

A new version of Elgg, the open source social networking platform, has been released. New features in Elgg 0.9 include:

• New "content" function for static pages editing
• Improved sidebar customization
• Simplified visual installation
• Security improvements
• Refactoring more functions into /mod
• Improved access permissions for admin to all areas/objects

Elgg 0.9 can be downloaded from SourceForge.

Elgg, an open source social networking platform, opened its development process much wider the past few months. Not every company that goes fully open source benefits from the changes in their license or the changes in how they develop and manage the code. However, open source seems to be treating Elgg very nicely these days.

Since fully opening up Elgg development and having a core team of
developers working on it progress has been staggering already in terms
of fixes and enhancements, but also in community discussion. Eric S. Raymond's
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" certainly holds true in
the case of Elgg, because what may be of most interest is that security
issues are being discovered one by one which have been in the code for
several releases already.

You can read more about Elgg's experiences with the more transparent development process by reading the rest of Misja Hoebe's post.

Update for Elgg is available to help fix a potential security vulnerability.

A security issue was detected in Elgg versions 0.8 and 0.7 which could potentially lead to a site compromise. Users are encouraged to update their system to release 0.8.1, users using version 0.7 can apply a patch, both available for immediate download from sourceforge.

Original Announcement

Packt Publishing is starting to announce the various winners in its Open Source CMS Awards.  The first category announced was the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

Judges comments for their decisions included:

• WordPress’s ease of configuration, professional approach, usability and enthusiastic community.
• Elgg as a true Open Source Social Networking CMS, its variety of themes and overall user experience.
• Drupal had a long list of positive comments from the judges and was praised as a good overall package.

Winners of the various categories will be announced throughout the week, including Best PHP on October 31st and Overall Winner on November 2nd.

The project managing Elgg, an open source networking platform, announced a couple days ago that the software is "now more open than ever".  The project will be opening "the development process, codebase, direction and software roadmap to the community".

More recently, expected changes at elgg.org were starting to take place with expectations of discussions taking place throughout the week.

This will mean structure both in tools to better support community led development of the software but will also mean putting together procedures how to organise it all.

On Monday, Packt Publishing announced the five finalists in each category of its 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  The five categories are Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  In the finals stage, the public as a whole is eligible to vote for each category through October 26th.  While that may seem like a long time for the polls to be open, I'd encourage you to vote early so that you have no excuse for why your favorite CMS didn't make it to the winners list.

Around this time last year, Packt Publishing announced the "top five" finalists for their award (no separate categories in 2006).  In 2006, those CMS projects that made it to the finalist list included Drupal, e107, Joomla, Plone, and Xoops.  When those five CMS were announced, I chose to double my efforts on covering those applications here at CMS Report.  Although the extra categories this year have brought quite a few more Open Source CMS into the foreground, I still don't see why I couldn't keep most of them on my CMS Focus radar scope.  With 16,000 people nominating their favorite CMS for this award, that amount of generated interest is hard to ignore.  Luckily, I already cover many of the CMS that did make it as a finalist...but there are still many new CMS on that list that will shake things up a bit here at CMSReport.com.

"I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki, and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they're taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration."

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