DESIGN PRINCIPLES IN SIPS
-------------------------

First of all, sips is the _Simple_ Internet Publishing System. While there are
countless numbers of "Slashdot clones" out there, several of which also
written in PHP, what sets sips apart is it's simplicity. The fact that sips
should be far simpler to set up than Slash and the likes, is not quite
what's meant by "simple".

Since sips (uniquely so) was meant for those without access to powerful web
servers that allows scripts access to modern SQL databases, cron jobs,
daemon processes etc, it _is_ of a limited nature. People with access to
all of the above, _should_ run something that scales to it - try Slash,
PHPSlash, thatPHPWare, Squishdot or any other.

Sips is for the simple people who have to be thankful for what they have.
Writing to and reading from raw files in various directories on the file system
is not the most powerful kind of "database".

Therefore, Sips should access these files as little as possible, and when it
does, it should do it as efficiently as possible.

Sips should be easy to set up and require only a minimum of maintanence.

Sips development should focus on stability and efficiency of features rather
than the amount of features. It should allow readers to access and search news,
and sort them to some extent. When discussion is implemented, it will not have
half of all the features of the Slashdot breed. While it will be threaded,
sorting posts will not be configurable to a very large extent, and moderation
is unlikely to be implemented.
