Post installation

When working with serialized data, for instance something like s:2:"29", how can I pull out the last value as an integer? I know you're supposed to use the unserialize function, but I can't figure out how to say "just that 29"

I've searched around, and haven't found much of anything useful.

Maybe this is under my nose, but I can't find it. When a new user registers at a Drupal site is there a method for notifying the site's admin through e-mail that the site has a new user?

-Bryan
CMS Report

I'm in the process of migrating my site from Geeklog to Drupal (yikes!), and I have a question that applies to Drupal in general. Is there any simple way to create "page" nodes and have them display without any blocks, styles, etc.?

Basically, Geeklog used to have an option for its static pages called "Blank Page." You could use the content-posting interface to post a pure HTML page, and by selecting "Blank Page" from the pull-down menu on the content submission form, that page would dispaly as though it weren't even a part of Geeklog -- no blocks, no headers, not even any CSS applied to it (unless you added your own). You could still edit it using the admin interface, but it would display as pure HTML independent of any Geeklog trappings. To an outside observer, it would look as though the page weren't even a part of a Geeklog site. ( See earthconsciousrevolution.org and The Real Matrix, for example. The only reason you can tell via URL that it's Geeklog is because I chose not to do masked domain forwarding. )

I'm looking to do the same in Drupal, but I can't seem to "break out" of the block/theme structure as easily as I could in Geeklog. I post a "page" node, and it has all of the blocks, headers, etc. One possible solution that I found was this:

I run velospace on Drupal 4.6 and have had a great time developing the site and making it work for my needs.

The problem is search results, which users rely heavily on, have been acting up recently. For example, compare the search results for:

http://velospace.org/search/node/orbit+uk

http://velospace.org/search/node/mavic+ellipse

I read some of online document and always mention a term node, what is it ?

We are converting our department web site to Drupal. Right now there is a person or group of persons responsible for each part of the site. When we convert to Drupal, what's the easiest way to give a user or role permission to "own" (i.e. only ones who can edit that section) a set of pages without giving them permission to edit all pages or to publish pages outside of that area? Is there a module that is set up to handle this sort of "sandbox" model?