Are group notifications (email method) enabled for the group and the member account you are testing the sending? There're setting pages for notifications and group notifications each user can configure on his own (Settings menu in topbar and then the two notification menu entries in the sidebar will bring you to these pages).

ok.. so now, I'm looking for an easy way to remove the original logout menu.  I see elgg_unregister_menu_item and tried:

elgg_unregister_menu_item('topbar', 'account/logout');

but that didn't work.. Guessing I need to somehow get the parent item and then somehow call out the child 'logout' item in order to remove it?

Also, I tried to add an image to my topbar menu that will link to another page.  I have factChain-Pen-badg3.png located in my /var/www/html/mod/fc-plugin/graphic/factChain-Pen-badge3.png and have the following code in start.php:

$text = elgg_view('output/img', array(

'src' => elgg_get_site_url(). 'mod/fc_plugin/graphic/factChain-Pen-badge3.png',

'alt' => '', 'class' => '',

'title' => '',

'width' => '',

'height' => '',

));

elgg_register_menu_item('topbar', array(

'name' => 'factChainPen',

'href' => 'https://mytesturlFC.com',

'text' => $text,

'priority' => 1000,

'section' => 'alt',

));

doesn't appear at all :-(

Thanks for the help, yes learn,try,search is the best approach, some of these items have required a quick turnaround so sometimes the research time makes it difficult to hit some deadlines.. It doesn't feel good asking for solutions without being thorough first so I know where you're coming from.  So thanks for all the help you've provided thus far. This is my first project with elgg and php so it has definitely been a learning experience.