I’m going for sessions being stored in the database anyway. For user groups, I’m planning on storing them in a table using nested sets as there’ll be different tiers of users, as you go up ther tiers users will have greater powers.
Once I’ve worked my way through the tutorials i’ll look through the code and decide on where i’m going to do things differently. I might well use the idea from the tutorial about custom javascript loading for CSS as my site will have some CSS that will be common to absolutely every page and some that will only be used in certain parts, to save having a massive CSS file.
I plan on learning javascript properly (not any library like for example jquery as with any given library chances are that i won’t actually use half of it and it’s pointless loading however many k in size jquery is when I might only need 1/4 of it in the end