A couple more avatars - including a default avatar to be shown when either a) a comment is written by a non-member or b) any member who doesn't have an avatar chosen.

Most of the work this week has been under the covers optimizing and organizing the article tables. The major change is conceptual at this point - to remove the need for a collection identifier (weblog owner, forum name, whatever) from the article itself. A collection doesn't belong to an article, an article belongs to a collection. While seemingly a minor logic nit, it makes a large difference in site organization. In fact doing it this way makes the displaying of articles more difficult, which is the reason why storing collection info with the article made sense originally. Going forward, to display an article, it will be necessary to track down which collection or collections it belongs to in order to evaluate their properties as they relate to the article.

In fact, this has to be done anyway. But that's where it gets interesting. An article may belong to more than one collection. Collections may have permission restrictions. In an ideal world, articles would also have permissions. They will eventually, but that would cause some performance issues at the moment. So I'll start with the collection. 

Site change: Macgirvin.COM has returned as a site host for this application. This is slightly amusing because that's where it all began. I know, the theme is looking a bit tired - I'll make it better in time.