Now that I've got the major part of the software working, I've been digging into all the little stuff. A lot of this you won't be able to see until I turn on registrations, so it may look like nothing has been done recently.

You might notice that there's a login block now. Yeah, I'm using sessions. It solves a lot of problems and makes the site work like any other site that uses logins. Those menus on the left -- click on one. They expand and collapse. If you're on my weblog page (not the main page) you'll see a guitar in the Author block. It's not just an image that I linked. It's my avatar and can follow me around the site. I've got an avatar selector and a modest but adequate collection to choose from.

So why haven't I turned on registrations? In a word, permissions. When you've only got one person, you don't have to worry much about who can access what. Once you allow a second or third person, permissions become critical. So I'm building in an entire infrastructure. On the first round, it will have four levels.

1. Anonymous (not logged in) - Can only read allowed stuff and maybe make comments
2. Registered - Has a login account and can maybe send private messages (consumer)
3. Author - Can write weblogs and do lots of stuff (producer)
4. Admin - Can do anything at all.

I'll probably turn on the 'registered' section first. There are still a few kinks to be worked out on the author level. Most of these have to do with changing the look and feel of their weblog. When this was a single user system, this could all be done with PHP and CSS. There won't be any public PHP (code) access, so whatever can't be done with CSS will have to be done with database tables (or not at all).

Oh, and I tossed the Kevin Roth editor (basically a script to turn on the browser editor) and went whole hog with tinyMCE. The difference is that I don't have to keep coming up with regex's to make it emit proper XHTML.