OK guys..
My Group Indexer utility is starting to look better, tho I liked older Elgg.org layout better ;-)
If  (someone screams for it )
{

    Publish_Group_indexer();
}
else
{
    echo "<p>;-O</p>";
}

@The Evaluator

@ the other people trying to respond here

Ok, I will admit to being a lot less familiar with this kind of forum, but I agree with The Evaluator that it is very hard to get a handle on things here.  I hate to enter the discussion with a question that has been asked a hundred times, or for which the answer can be found in the equivalent of a FAQ.

But here's my problem.  A programmer friend just spent five months (!) trying to learn elgg and implement a social network for our particular purpose.  We are an all-volunteer, non-profit group.  I can't just fire him because he took so long to do this.  My own background is business, but I have directed technical teams.  Now I have to determine whether the problem is elgg, or just my friend the programmer who does not want to communicate, but sit and write code.

I had been CEO of a small Internet company that used asp, .NET and MS SQLServer.  I am used to understanding the technical effort by at least undertanding the data model (entity relationship diagram) using visual tools.  I know this is a hard task for OOP.

Is there a tool we can use to see the table relationships underlying the parts of the social engine that we are trying to use?   Right now, I am completely lost:  I know there are 4 ENTITIES and about a thousand objects, but I can't find any intermediate way to conceptualize what we are dealing with here.

A related question:  Let's say you built a social network in elgg, and it was built by a single programmer.  That programmer gets run over by a bus.  Now, what documentation should another programmer get so that he can pick up on what was already done.  Do you just give him what you have and tell him "Go figure it out!"  or is there some reasonably standard way to figure out a social network built on elgg? If it were not OOP you could get a tool to just "x-ray" the database and all the relationships and keys, etc.

Many thanks, and abject apologies that I can't find these these myself.

John

This information you're asking for is linked from http://elgg.org.&nbsp; Click on "Docs" in the upper right.

From the documentation wiki, look at the last two sections, which are all about development.  Should answer a lot of questions!