On my visit to the CLC I spoke to Simon Elledge about Elgg and showed him how it worked. He was very interested as it fits in very well with a project he is planning for September He is moving jobs soon taking up a position at Roehampton involving teacher training so is ideally placed to help promote it. I created an account from him in the afternoon and discovered another but in the useradd script: in perl "not equal" is "!=" for numbers but "ne" for strings so the test I had put in for adding (or not) an email address was not working. Made the change and tested - now it works as expected.
At some point I need to get these scripts into the main file tree so that they can be kept within subvsersion. Convert to php? This would make the constants more consistent but will need extra work. Not urgent.
