Not exactly (I think). 

If my live site looks like this:

I'd like to be able to have this on an external page:

Note how certain menu items are disabled on the external page. Basically, while the user navigates my site, I want them to stay connected to the basic elg functionality.

i kinda intentionally said " something similar to .. " ;-)
you do want want somethwang similar, but with extras..
the elgg.org topbar sorta disappears while in the @comm,
which has it's own topbar menu..
you want the connexn w/ yr @comm *all the time,
while moving between the strict 'elgg' areas and
other non-elgg areas of your whole setup.
if this is so -- i am sure it can be done with some
creativeness & imagination for the initial design of navigation.
i'll be doing this after/ when i have set up my own littwle
embracheee site for proper elgg tech & prods integration..
if i only had more time.. only time...;-oO one of these days;-O

Hehe...yeah...if I only understood the model more, I'd get this done. I've been hacking at it for 3 days straight and am at my wit's end right now.

You can take a look at the WebServices APIs of Elgg. Another easy option is to load the elgg engine in to your application and after that, you can use all Elgg API's inside that

Thanks so much for the quick reply. I've looked at the WebServices API, however, I'm less enthusiastic for performance reasons (site will be hosted on the same server, so I don't see why I'd run 2 instances of apache and pass JSON between the apps, when I can run it native).

I'll look into loading the engine, you wouldn't happen to have a link to a guide on how to do this? I'm trying to absorb as much info about Elgg as possible, but it's a bit overwhelming.

Cheers, 

Pierre

Thanks, I think I got it. I tried to include engine/start.php but it wasn't working. Eventually I found out that there was a domain name mismatch (127.0.0.1 vs localhost), which was causing the load to fail.

I'm on my way to get this working. Thanks again!