Over the past few weeks I have been heavily involved in writing the upcoming 1.0 release of the Elgg social networking platform. Elgg 1 is the logical extension of Elgg classic but has been totally rewritten from the ground up, and I admit that I am rather excited about some of the cool features I’ve been working on…

For a start, Elgg 1 uses an entirely new and flexible object modal under the hood. I won’t say much on this except that we have focused on simplicity and flexibility, and I think you’ll like what we’ve come up with.

Next is a new thing for Elgg. I have been developing a flexible and highly extensible API framework that will let Elgg plug-in writers expose functionality to third party applications. You’ve had a taster of this with the Elgg Voices API, but Elgg takes this a lot further.

The new API even lets plugin authors extend the framework by providing new output formats above and beyond the JSON, XML and PHP serialisation that Elgg already has native support for. Plugin authors can even add new client authentication methods to API.

I think this will leave a lot of scope open for some very interesting plug-ins!