ok thanks, i read that php6 will be having a built-in alternative php cache (APC) in each install. it's going to be the "de-facto" standard php caching mechanism. can't wait for that.

@Brett    Sorry about the shareware comment. I know the difference, it's just that when the "mothership" (elgg.org) runs at such sporadic speeds, it just, well, makes the whole thing seem a little wacky sometimes. But that's part the exciting thrill...it's like an old Dodge Dart, you hit the gas and ANYTHING could happen. :)

Cim,

It will be good to have APC in core. It is a pain at times to get APC to build against some of the newer PHP releases. That said, you should also try XCache and compare and go with the one that milks the best performance for Elgg.

Another thing, change page_elements/header.php to pull the JQuery and and JQueryUI files from one of the CDNs (Google, MSFT etc).

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.2/jquery-ui.min.js

This should save you a lot on bandwdith and get better response times. But do make sure that when you do an Elgg upgrade to see the versions being used in the release are the same ones that are being linked to.

1.8's menu system will not be backported to 1.7.

There 1.7 menu systems are capable of creating menus, as you can see from this site.  What sort of menus are you trying to create?  Have you looked at how other plugins and core create menus?

For 1.7 you can create a menu for example with the header menu plugin: http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/project/452811/developer/uddhavadasa/header-menu-and-online-users

Artoim, we already did most of the tasks you mentioned for custom content on our client pages, you can see challengesd.eu for reference. It was an awfull lot of work, but we finally figured out a system which is suitable for Elgg. It don't implement every point as you described, but the expected results are the same. Custom content types have full translation, while other contents have language flags. User can decide which content he wants to display.

If you want to know more about this system, please contact me at info@elggdev.com.