Appendix A. Developer's Quick Start Guide
This is a short developer's guide for the Elgg framework from a top down perspective. It explores the concepts behind Elgg's design and introduces the design patterns used by Elgg. It also describes the core components that a developer needs to know. For a more tutorial-based introduction to developing with Elgg, see Chapters 7-9.
The intended audience of this guide is developers who are building a website with Elgg or who are interested in building plugins. It assumes knowledge of PHP and fluency with software development terminology.
As a quick start guide, it does not cover topics in detail. Instead, the emphasis is on providing a big picture view of Elgg. As each core component is covered, pointers to the source code are given for further investigation. In addition to the documentation in the source code, Elgg's wiki (http://docs.elgg.org) is a good resource for learning specifics about how Elgg works.
