Falling in love with PHP

I checked out a few tutorials last night because I didn't feel like doing much so I figured I'd read some crap that I probably wouldn't understand anyway. I've been editing other people's code for a year or two (with an emphasis on content management systems while looking for the perfect one) but never really understood how to put things TOGETHER.

It'll be a while before I wean myself from tutorial dependency, but I was actually understanding the stuff! Like, really!

Now I have to rethink the way I want to do the content management system I've been wanting to make for a year or two but never had the mad skillz to do.

I want to make a site that projects such as TUH, AFG, and Hero7 would be able to use to help streamline making an amateur game's content and to describe the project to visitors. The first thing I need to decide, though, is the approach.

Separation of Public from Private Content

Physical Easier to know what content is private and what is public - it's completely different page! Could just put the private site pages in a subfolder, rather than a subdomain or other domain, and share database users. Members navigate to that subfolder when they want to work More confusing site structure, with public in root level, and a whole other site in a subfolder or a subdomain Harder to make plugins to extend the capability, since private plugins would have to be programmed to be at a different level than public plugins in order to be more private, several different templates for plugins

Virtual Could just mark the public content as such with coding, so it's obvious even in the middle of a ton of private content Easier to keep user details integrated, and to assimilate new users from the fanbase Less confusing site structure - everything is where it was before, rather than hidden somewhere else - also less clicks deep Easier to make plugins, only a couple of templates needed, one for plugins that are only pages and one for plugins that are subfolders

On reflection, I think virtual separation is the way to go... if someone wants to insist on physical separation for total privacy when they install the software, they'd only have to add something to grab the users from the first installation and use those in a second installation with different group access, no guest access and different plugins.

Any thoughts?