Question About Areas

Hi there

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but I am curious and a bit
baffled as to how best implement this:

I thinking of a CMS type website, modular, with dynamic (MDB based)
content, all driven from a single index.php and using smarty.

The thing is, when I think about defining or designing a flexible
permission structure, I hit a wall when I try to merge my ideas with
LiveUser's aparent structure (I could be wrong).

When I think of site/application it usually has a hierarchy (think
sitemap) or tree structure, or even directory structure. i.e. Areas or
Categories, with subareas/subcategories.

With this in mind, I then think, why is there no subareas like there is
subgroups.

An example where there may be some tree depth would be say a news or faq
type module, with
website.com/news/category/subcategory/moresubcategories/etc.

The reason I ask, is that the areas table within the permDB container
would/could form an integral part of a sites structure, defining the
hierarchy of areas within the site.

Am I talking rubbish?

All I can think of at the moment is that there is gonna be a lot of
defines, and als going to have to write some nice code to dynamically
add defines based on....something....hmmm.

Can anyone shed some light on my dilemma.  I do understand the examples
in CVS, so understand basically how it works...just marry the two.

Don't get me wrong...I FULLY intend to use LiveUser...but have not
really tested it yet, as (you can probably guess) I havent got my head
round it yet fully, and would really like a nice admin gui to make it
easy...also, some examples with smarty templates would be cool :-).

I'd be glad to contribute smarty examples once the API has stablised.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, if nothing else!

--
Simon H