Site (code) updates
Yesterday I enabled site-wide user registration, login and logout. Today I enabled AJAX for the login.
This is a minor step, but important, since this is the very basis for enabling user content. By enabling AJAX-ified login I created a basis for a modern interface. The Javascript-disabled browsers still get all the functionality, but IMHO AJAX is not just a hype but really is a great technology for faster browsing.
I’m using SMF forum on my site. The new site-login uses the user data collected by SMF forum. However - and I’m quite proud of this - only during the login procedure itself I use SMF and its database. I avoid any additional calls to SMF, not even via the relatively lightweight smf_api.php API file they provide (compared to the native SMF routines in SSI.php)! After SMF user authentication I rely on the PHP session mechanism only. True, SMF does more sanity checks to ensure security, but when the only issue is to display to the user the fact they are logged in, and not a security critical action like withdrawing money or deleting uploaded content, it makes little sense to have all this overhead for a simple status message!
A few days ago I switched to swfobject 2.0 for Flash detection, and to having just one site-wide PHP template file for displaying the Flash multimedia content. One of the differences now: This new version of swfobject does not require Javascript to function. This is for the very few people who disable Javascript (the Firefox “noscript” plugin is quite popular…), but forgot to remove Flash… 
Mörre
PS: If anyone finds a bug in this new login code send me an email, please! (webmaster@letexa.com)