Development Log

HELPP – Technical Issues

So far with running Elgg the main areas where we have encountered problems have been:

Server-side configuration: Initially we ran our Elgg site on Apache and windows, windows being the default college operating system. Whilst this did work well, the amount of add-ons and workarounds needed to get the most out of Elgg, particularly the tiny-mce wysiwyg editor, and our own modules did hamper performance and cause some ‘head-aches’ for Windows.

We then moved to a Linux and Apache environment and it became clear that Elgg preferred this environment, performance improved and most if not all the problems we had encountered under windows disappeared.

Elgg Configuration: Our main problem here was fixing some of the bugs in Elgg that came in the distribution (version 0.8). These mostly consisted of the odd SQL query missing a parameter or some missing lines of code and with help from the development community on elgg.org these were solved.

Other problems we encountered whilst developing our download and placement modules, stemmed from the way in which Elgg itself is written and trying to understand how the various functions fitted together. One issue in particular allowed non - logged in users to see users’ icon photo/pic. This was fixed by adding a check to the file, icon.php, to verify that the client requesting the icon was logged in with valid credentials.