I love cutenews being flat file. fits great on my jump drive, is easy to upload, download whatever it's quick simple and the including of news throughout your site is an incredibly simple way of doing things. really really love it.. in fact if you started implementing mysql i'd stop using it. it's the reason i love it. i've ran it on so many sites and never had a problem and if i did i've found a hack for just about everything. it is more flexible than i ever realzed. i've turned cutenews into a forum, contact form, newsletter, blog, store, search engine.. you name it.. i can make it do anything just about. i dont see any need for anything else EXCEPT a beautiful integrated rating system and WHERE'D PREVIEW GO!? I really liked that especially for my newbie posters and the ability to preview would be great again now that you have postpone articles feature which i must add is the best thing i've ever seen. i can add content to all my popular sites for the whole month and not eve look.
So.. of the hacks, hacks I've done and things I haven't seen tried at all... I'm real interested in these things being installed standard or invented for cutenews:
Hacks from the Forum I'd like to see Integrated: Random News Hack (or random headlines, whichever), Views Hack, Captcha Hack, Newsletter Hack, Latest Comments Hack, (possibly) a PHPBB hack to integrate users so they sign up for forum and cutenews journalist at the same time (yeah i added that last one out of the blue off the top of my head)
New Things for Future Versions: Rating Script.. cutenews would be #1 with a rating script. (this would be sooooooooo great with the random script, and would really beef up the latest comments as well. it would just make the site so so shiny)
Other than that, you nailed this script on the head. I make web pages almost daily using cutenews... just so you know.
oh and is there a way to make the search simpler? i find it unecessary to search all broken like that. i'd just like one search and it would search title, short-story, and full-story all at once.. maybe even comments.. and instead of showing just the title as the search results.. what about showing title and short-story? you could make it show up a lot like google or yahoo with a search engine look to it. think bout it.. might go play with your code and see if i can hack that one myself