Hi Robert, interesting that you started looking at Minds and had those issue getting their stuff installed.  Minds was originally built on Elgg, I haven't looked at it in a long time though.

Anyway, for timeline stuff the best plugins to start with are:

https://github.com/hypejunction/hypefeed

https://github.com/hypejunction/hypeinteractions

We have a plugin section on the community site here but much of it is out of date since development really embraced github/composer/packagist.  If you're looking for a specific kind of functionality and can't tell if something exists asking is probably the easiest way to get pointed in the right direction until we can find a better way to integrate everything.

Thank you very much.  I am sure it will take me a while to get up to snuff, been using WordPress for my main website but I'd have to re-write half the base code to get it to do what I want.  I had no problem getting this installed.  In fact I installed a new server, Ubuntu Bionic, Apache, OpenSSL (compiled from source because I wanted to enable HTTP2 and their openssl was broken), PHP, and MariaDB and then this and got it all working on two days.  So now I can proceed to learning how to customize.  I spent several months on Minds before giving up and never got it operational.  This is much like WordPress in it's ease of getting setup but more flexible.  Like WordPress it also works on a modern platform. So thank you much for the warm welcome and the recommendations.

I installed hypefeed but it says, "missing dependencies" in red and won't let me activate it. Ok, found out how to find those, read the manifest.xml and loaded the two additional plugins, activated the whole lot but no wall or timeline appears on my site.  Yea I know I look like an idiot but I'm only two days into this.

The hyperFeed and hyperInteractions did change the way Activities looked into something resembling a timeline but broke "Friends", spews a long PHP error.  It's looking for a column in the database that does not exist.

Be sure, that you've downloaded from Releases not Source:

https://github.com/hypeJunction/hypeFeed/releases/download/1.0.6/hypeFeed-1.0.6.zip

https://github.com/hypeJunction/hypeInteractions/releases/download/5.3.1/hypeInteractions-5.3.1.zip

Same for other plugins.

Incidentally, I did find the github approach very easy as to install a plugin all I have to do is, as user elgg, the UID I have it running under, cd /var/www/html/mod;git clone (clone URL).  No need to unzip, mess with ftp, etc.

Cloning a git repository is not an ideal approach: 1) if your project is version controlled, then all these directories won't make it into your repo, 2) updating things will take a while, as you will have to go through each project and do a git pull, 3) cloning does not resolve dependencies, so you have to do a composer install on each project

The best way to manage your project:

1). Install composer https://getcomposer.org/

2). Install Elgg as a project http://learn.elgg.org/en/2.0/intro/install.html#upload-elgg

3). Install individual plugins using 

composer require hypejunction/hypefeed

This will install the project with all of its dependencies.

You can then do the following to update all depencies/plugins

composer update

If you are version controlling your project, make sure to commit composer.lock, then in your production environment, just run

composer install

That way you will be sure that your production is always on the same version as your testing environment.

I've made a gist:

https://gist.github.com/hypeJunction/b1f89b829dfa669974cc465a46d3ab07

The very first line in the install instructions failed as follows:

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
PHP Fatal error:  sodium_init() in Unknown on line 0
PHP Warning:  copy(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages:
error:1416F086:SSL routines:tls_process_server_certificate:certificate verify failed in Command line code on line 1
PHP Warning:  copy(): Failed to enable crypto in Command line code on line 1
PHP Warning:  copy(https://getcomposer.org/installer): failed to open stream: operation failed in Command line code on line 1

My SSL cert is good so not sure what it is complaining about.

Stackoverflow would be a better place for debugging composer installer issues.