Elgg 1.5

Installation

To install elgg1.5 postgres version, you will need to follow these steps:

  • Checkout tag from svn: 
    svn co https://code.oregonstate.edu/svn/admin/elgg/branches/elgg1.5
  • Go ahead and use the web installer
  • Before you register your first user account, add the line below to engine/settings.php (to use file based session): 
     $CONFIG->use_file_sessions = true;
  • Don't forget to go to: elgg/pg/admin/plugins/ to enable any necessary plugins

Branches

The work that we are doing in elgg 1.5, can be divided into three areas:

  • fixing sql queries - making them more sql generic so they work in both mysql and postres
  • php errors fixes - some of the existing php errors in elgg 1.5 can get in our way while writing code
  • adodb support - replacing the various mysql_* functions with ADOdb functions

In order to keep the patches and our work as separate as possible, we have 4 branches to keep everything clean. This should make submitin patches back to the elgg community and getting them tested a lot easier. The branches we have are:

  • elgg1.5 - this branch contains the work of the three branches below merged into it. This branch should also contained bsc specific work (themes, modules, and other things)
  • elgg1.5-adodb
  • elgg1.5-sql-fixes
  • elgg1.5-php-fixes

External Documentation

Elgg

ADOdb

Modules

It looks like most modules do not write any sql statements directly. Instead they use ElggObject? which takes care of writing to the database and any other sql statements.

Core

Unfortunately the core code of Elgg does have quite a bit of sql statements, spread out through various files.

Debugging

One of the things that I hated the most about elgg 0.9.x was that they supressed errors. The practice still continues in elgg 1.5. To display php errors normally follow the steps below:

  • .htaccess => make sure that display_errors is set to 1
  • engine/start.php => make sure that you comment out the error handler functions.

Bugs

  • Search is only over tags User search was broken
  • Doesn't have a tag cloud (but there is a plugin)
  • Tags search are case sensitive I've got a fixed copy of this --bettse

Theming

  • Themes are done as plugins
  • They can extend of override default view components
  • Since images like the logo and OSU wordmark will be used in both Elgg and Trac theme, they should be centralized on the webserver (perhaps /var/www/social/images/)

Database Backup

To get a backup of live db: 

pg_dump -h dogwood.osuosl.org -U username bsc_elgg15 > bsc-live-db-YYYYMMDD.sql

Note: For security reasons the command above can only be run from the live box

Database Import

psql -d elgg elgg < bsc-live-db-YYYYMMDD.sql

Import Db Dump

Based on http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/DuplicateInstallation you need to run the commands below 

update elgg_sites_entity set url = 'http://munin-vm3.eecs.oregonstate.edu/social/' where guid = 1;
update elgg_datalists set value = '/var/www/social/' where name = 'dataroot';
update elgg_datalists set value = '/var/www/social/' where name = 'path';