I'm back from a lengthy vacation, and have started putting my nose back the the grindstone...  I'm still catching up at work, and dealing with a new promotion (I'll be supporting institutional research instead of business applications).

Our group has been working on putting together a custom template.  I was hoping that we'd be able to make a default template without changing any code, and figured out a way to do so.  It turns out that you can put a line in config.php "template_id = 3;" that will set the default global template.  It's not documented anywhere, but looks to work pretty well.  Update: This overwrites people's individual templates in the latest SVN. 

We have been experiencing some troubles with templates.  The main problem they seem to run into is that templates assume that Elgg is installed in a root directory.  There are a lot of url('_template/file1.jpg') mentions.  I think that this needs to be fixed, as it's a real pain having to update all of the templates to url('some_subdirectory/_template/file1.jpg').  I'm guess that we need a magic token like {{url}} that will be replaced with the url specified in the config.php file.  My group is meeting with the sponsor of our grant tomorrow night, and we should get some good feedback and overall direction from her.  We've put our site online at http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse -- visitors are welcome.  Membership will be limited to CGU students to maintain some reason for using Elgg instead of blogger/myspace/...

Nathan