I decided to make this tutorial, even my English is bad because there was no video tutorials for Elgg customization.

Elgg 1.11 is used in video tutorial but all the code from tutorial will work on newer versions. It is tested on Elgg 2.0 alpha and everything from video tutorial works as expected.

This video tutorial covers:

• How to build Elgg plugin


• How to change wording
  
  - Change word blogs to notes


• What are Elgg views and how to use them for customizing Elgg webiste


• How to override views
  
  - Identify right view to change
  
  - Remove elements of the page by overriding  with an empty view
  
  - Change elgg text logo to image logo


• How to extend views
  
  - Extend Elgg css view with plugin css view
  
  - Extend sidebar view with plugin views
  
  - Views order, append and prepend view


• How to unextend view
  
   

You can download finished Elgg plugin from video tutorial here. This plugin will not work on your website until you change images path to your website address. This is explained at 19:30.