Our new plugins for the elgg community

Details

Published on Thursday, 28 June 2012 19:31

Written by Mark Harding

We have a huge task for this summer - to contribute three plugins to the Elgg community. Why? Our main source of business is from the Elgg market and we want to give back to the community by providing it with quality free plugins. 

So, what have we got planned? First of all we have a radical overhaul of our very popular elgg mobile plugin. The mobile market has expanded rapidly since we first released the plugin in 2010, and so has the way people use Elgg. The new plugin will be completely re-written from the ground up and be built with smart phones in mind whilst still being able to support older devices. 

The next plugin we plan on reworking is the elgg notifications plugin we released a couple of years back. This was originally just an experiment and wasn't (an isn't) meant for production sites, mainly because it is a bit hacky - in fact completely hacky! However, we have seen hundreds of users taking advantage of the plugin on their sites - it is in popular demand. The plan is not to simply update this plugin for 1.8, instead it is to completely redo and rethink. Elgg 1.9 will see a new notification system but we think that that is too far away; people want something now and for 1.8.  

The final plugin we have planned is a payment framework for elgg called elgg pay. This will enable an elgg site to take advantage of e-commerce, for example, charging users a monthly fee to use your site. The plugin alone will act as a mechanism for which payments can be made, accounted for etc but it really becomes powerful once other plugins extend it. A shop/store plugin could hook into the plugin with a few simple lines of code, for example. 

These plugins will be on GitHub so please do contribute and test them out. We want these plugin to be as community as possible. 

GitHub Repositories

Elgg mobile (please see 2.0 branch)

Elgg notifications

Elgg Pay