Elgg 1.7 beta has been released

It's with great pleasure that I announce Elgg 1.7 beta has been released! Grab a copy from the downloads page and start testing!

I would like to remind everyone that while many bugs have been corrected, Elgg 1.7 is still beta quality software and should not be used in a production environment. When upgrading, be sure to back up your current installation and closely follow the documented procedures in UPGRADE.txt. In addition to these instructions, Cash has written an informative series of posts on the community site about preparing for the 1.7 upgrade.

As previously mentioned, Elgg 1.7 enhances security by requiring security tokens on all actions. Plugins that have not been updated to use security tokens will produce a "Form is missing __token or __ts fields" error. For authors of plugins that do not have security tokens, please review the documentation on actions and security for information about how to add tokens to your plugins.

Some of the biggest changes in Elgg 1.7 include:

• Full UTF8 support in the database
• Full text search (as a joint effort between Curverider and the MITRE corporation)
• More manageable user data directories
• A new entity-fetching API
• Working and re-written REST API (thanks to Cash Costello).
• Tons and tons of bugfixes!

I ask everyone evaluating Elgg 1.7 beta to please make bug reports to the appropriate Trac. For Elgg core, bug reports should be made at http://trac.elgg.org/elgg while any problems with extensions should be submitted to http://trac.elgg.org/extensions.

Again, I want to thank everyone who has helped to bring Elgg this far! In the last couple weeks there have been some great bug reports and information from users like Thomas, gv, and Mike Lietz. Please keep up the great bug reports and feedback!