Elgg Widget – Amazon Wish List

Last week I finished work on a simple Elgg widget for displaying your Amazon Wish List. http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/rsrobbins/read/20493/amazon-wish-list-widget I started this project quite some time ago but got stuck on some jQuery AJAX errors. I’m doing a lot more work on Elgg now so I decided to get this out of the way.

I recently installed Elgg on my iBook G4 to get some experience on running it on a different platform. I’ve been using Apache 2.0 and PHP 5 on Windows to do my development work. Elgg requires the mod_rewrite module to work properly so you can’t run it on a Windows IIS web server. Over the weekend I tried this Rewrite module for IIS http://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/Download.html. This seemed very promising but the widgets don’t work correctly so I think I will stick to Apache for now. Installing Elgg on my iBook was slightly more difficult than usual because MySQL isn’t using its default port number on that system. It is getting tiresome to keep my various installations in sync so I may just use the Mac version to test installation steps for plugins or to document the installation process.

I’m currently working on comment threading for the blog plugin. This is going pretty well. I have created a new ElggObject for the comments to replace the annotation method of handling comments. I’ve also worked out the code for displaying these ElggObject comments. I’ve been using my bare bones plugin template for this work and I’ll soon attempt to integrate it into the default blog plugin. I’m also working on a WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR export view for Elgg. This will make it possible to export your Elgg blog posts to WordPress. But I should really work on an import script because I need plenty of blog posts for testing purposes.