checked in last night. the changes are:

• user-rights are now (internally) bit-level encoded. this should make it much easier to create new predefined roles or even offer fine-grained user-rights (defined per user). thanks to hns for the eye-opener
• as a result, there's now a new role - "content manager" - that gives full rights on all contents (stories, comments, images, goodies), but is not allowed to edit weblog-preferences, members and skins. hope this works for you, kris.
• i tried to solve the membership-mess in antville (as discussed here and here), meaning: - i removed the possibility for admins to disable user-signup. - "signup" (which is now called "subscription") has - for now - just one benefit: the subscribed weblog is added to a list, which results in a page for every user containing these subscribed weblogs plus the ones the user is a member of (= contributor, content manager or admin). to give this more sense this "your subscriptions"-page also contains a list ordered by the last update (kind of a "personal" version of the weblog-list on antville.org). and maybe one day there will be a mail-notification-service in antville too ... - users are now also allowed to "unsubscribe" - users do not have to subscribe to a weblog anymore just to get a chance of becoming a contributor, contentmanager or admin, it's all up to admins now: search for existing user-accounts (by username), choose the appropriate account and define the role of this user. should make things clearer.

i also cleaned up the code a bit more, and as always i hope i didn't introduce any new bugs. since this was the last big change on database-level i think antville should now be quite safe for the long-awaited update (after a bit more testing of course). anyway, please comment on these changes and report any bugs you found.

(btw.: there's a new db-patch called antville_dbpatch20020109.sql - please apply before)