The wording of links is the easiest thing to change, you just have to find the language key that defines them and then redefine them in your theme - assuming your theme is last in the plugins list (whatever is last takes precedence).

http://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/guides/i18n.html

Dashboard link - is the dashboard plugin active?  Dashboard is only available when logged in, is this link showing that behavior when logged out?  Make sure the url of the link is correct.

Login link - hard to say, for a separate login page it should just go to '/login'.  Sounds like it may just link to the current page and was intended to trigger something via js (like a lightbox?) that's not working properly...

Market plugin - identify the view where the link is generated, then copy the view to your theme and just output the content without the link

Register widget - not sure offhand, I so rarely use widgets these days

All other points - not really sure what you're asking about, but more than likely it can be solved by overwriting a view or hooking into the entity registration

http://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/guides/menus.html#advanced-usage

@Rory205 I really have a huge problem to understand your posting. What I don't understand with most of your questions is if you currently have a problem, if you made a modifications resulting in a problem or if you just want to make a modification to achieve something.

Do you have a problem with login? If so, did you have this problem ever since installing Elgg? If the problem has been there since the beginning, something might be wrong with the server configuration (rewrite rules not fully working). If the problem started later, you most likely added a plugin not compatible with the versions of Elgg you are using (plugins written for Elgg 1.x are not all compatible with Elgg 2.x).

The names of the menu entries can be modified by changing the corresponding language strings, e.g. the "Group blog" name is connected to the language string 'blog:group' within the language file of the blog plugin. You can modify the default language output by overriding the default string with your own string by creating a customization plugin for a language string you want to change. It's better this way as you wouldn't have to modifiy the original language files and won't risk to lose your changes when updating Elgg. Just take a look at https://elgg.org/plugins/1497293 for an example of how such a modification of language strings can be implemented.

With the Market plugin it's also a matter of language strings. What you see displayed as category names is the raw language strings. Just add the category name you want to show within a language file, e.g.

'market:category:category_name' => "My category name",

The category names being handled as language strings allow you to display the names in different languages if necessary depending on the language perference of your users.

Your explanations of the other issues are too unspecific for me to understand what you have in mind. Try to explain it more detailed. You might also want to try solving one issue after the other and don't try to change everything at once without knowing much about what you are doing. You can't expect to get everything working after just one day. It might also be better to open separate topics for each issue as it's much easier for anyone trying to help you to understand what you have in mind.

Hey, welcome to Elgg.  Learning curves can suck, but it sounds like you've got a background that would lend itself to this :)
 

Have you checked out the docs?  There is a section there about security: http://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/design/security.html

Thanks Matt! Just about to. Im currently upgrading my servers again. Interestingly I did it on a server running Centos 7.2 and no issues. However that server is limited to some other projects I dont want to mix around so upgrading my server on the other ones before I finish working out this install. I hate learning curves as much as I hate wordpress and drupal lol. I'll take a look at the docs in a few.

Anyone set with android and ios development for elgg now?