Post installation

After having done a bit of work with Drupal and becoming a fan of it, i was looking at some blogging applications for last one month. I have installed and tried Nucleus, BlogCMS, Wordpress, pLog, serendipity, and couple more(all open source), but some how could not convince myself to use any of them for one problem or the other.

With my little experience i can do a good job at Drupal, but this one seems to be a little difficult and thats why i am seeking support from all you good people.

I'm currently in the process of designing/implementing a CMS-based site, and have *almost* settled on Drupal as my CMS. The "almost" comes from the fact that I'm having a lot of trouble getting my head wrapped around the template customization process.

I have trackback installed. I have trackback on every node submitted in my site, and have sent some trackbacks too. My trackback's received block is empty. other blogs I pinged via trackback did not acknowledge they were received.

I smell a rat. Something is awry with either sending or receiving, or both. How do I test this, what can I do? Also, some items I post as blog and some as story. Does that matter for trackback? It has trackback URL's listed on both types of nodes.....

Help! Who knows how this works and how to test?

There is a great node (actually nodes: http://drupal.org/node/31331 and http://drupal.org/node/35686 ) on how to create a module based on the story module, and it got me thinking...

Got some problems with the PHP session that mucks up the display of certain admin nodes. Initiallly, I thought it was the installation and setup. But just found that the PHP session got corrupted somehow and it affects that admin node. Looking thru Dupal's site regarding the PHP settings in the settings.php.

Have update once I understand and deploy the patch.

Sort out the unsightly PHP session matter by adding these parameters in the .htaccess

Can anyone give me the the mysql statement (ie the SELECT statement) to return the number of unauthorised or blocked users?