currently the admin can define navigation menus for members, contributors and admins. everything is fine for me as long as you don't change this. in case i want to set up a site for someone else i can simply remove the link to the skin editor. this is not possible for manila, because they automatically generate an "editors" menu.

if you switch to user specific permissions as in movable types or as suggested you have to rework the navigation menus.

the idea of a "managing editor", but i have really no idea what bitwise or-checks could do in case of finer grained permissions ... pls explain.

I was mainly thinking out loud. What I described is a technique to implement fine grained rights management, i.e. a situation where you don't have predefined roles, but permissions that can be combined individually. So what you do is to use the single bits of an integer number to encode these permissions. The lowest order bit of the number means a user has permission x if it is set, or doesn't have permission x if it is not set. the next bit represents a different permission, and so on. You set and check these bits individually by using the "bitwise and" operator & and the "bitwise or" operator |. For example, to switch on bit 3, you'd do

perm | 4

and to check for the second bit you'd do

perm & 2

Of course then you use constants with nice names to represent these permissions:

MAY_WRITE = 1; MAY_EDIT = 2; MAY_SET_PREFS = 4; MAY_EDIT_SKINS = 8; IS_HOLY_GHOST = 16;

...

if (memberinfo & IS_HOLY_GHOST) res.writeln ("HALELUJA!");