You have installed Elgg on your server and worked through any initial server issues. The question you may be asking yourself is now what? The answer to that question partly depends on why you installed Elgg in the first place. Let's assume your evaluating Elgg as the basis of a social networking project.
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While it may be tempting to go to the community site and install every interesting plugin, it is better to initially stick with the plugins included with the installation package. This will allow you to get a sense of what the platform is like without any issues possibly introduced by a plugin that's not written well. Assuming that you have already created your first user (who is automatically an admin), using the toolbar on top go to Site Administration -> Tools Administration and then enable all plugins. This should give you a basic set of social networking functionality: blog, social bookmarking, files, internal messaging, microblogging, notifications, activity feed, message board, user profiles.
You have two choices for creating test users with the plain install. You can sign them up by going to the home page or as an admin, you can create users by using the administrative interface (Administration -> User Administration). You'll probably want to use a different browser when using a test user since only one user can be logged in at a time in a browser.
Now use your test users to create blogs, add widgets to your profile or dashboard, post to the wire (microblogging), and create pages (wiki-like page creation). Make sure to investigate the Settings off the toolbar. This is where a user sets notification settings and configures tools (which will be blank as none of the default plugins add controls here).
All of the admin controls are found by clicking Administration on the toolbar. You have already used the administration section to turn on plugins and you may have created some users with it also. Now use it to browse the log or play around with modifying the default profile fields. You will also want to go to the Tools Administration page and look for plugins that have settings. With the riverdashboard plugin, turn its dashboard override setting to yes and then notice how the dashboard has changed from an individual page with widgets to a site-wide activity stream.
After satisfying yourself on what Elgg can do out of the box, you will want to try out some themes and plugins. You can find many plugins and themes at the community site. As is normal with this sort of thing, the quality varies so be sure to notice what sort of comments a plugin is getting.
The easiest way to look through the plugins is to sort by the number of downloads (most popular). Plugins are installed in the mod directory and activated on the Tools Administration page. You can find instructions on installing and configuring plugins here. If you run into any difficulty, be sure to check the Administration FAQ.
Themes are plugins that override display aspects of Elgg. They should normally be placed at the bottom of the plugin list so that the theme runs last. There were some significant changes between Elgg 1.2 and Elgg 1.5 so beware what versions the theme supports. Also, the default theme is built into Elgg and does not need to be turned off. Whenever you install a theme, you are overriding all or portions of the default. Be sure to read the instructions on installing a theme.