So I've used the recipe to create the signup form but it was just the "conference" signup form and I guess the tutorial meant to say, it was more of making a list of people rather than making actual members,

I was wondering if there was a way that after a member is "OKd" if they can be added to the database and removed from the list? Thus the registration would be all the users waiting to be added to the database.

I was also wondering if I could simply have the forum module installed and use it's registration as the site wide registration?

Basically my website is:
- a private website, so anyone wanting to actually view the content would have to login
- a registration page and login function
- it will need a news section that more than one user can post on (should I create a news section or can the blog module allow for multiple users to have posting privs?)
- if possible, the news section could have "news" and "event" postings, event postings could have a datefield so they could be put on a calendar, i'm not sure how to go about getting the event<-->calender to work
- an information sharing section --> basically a "media" section where files can be uploaded by members, all this needs is some sort of index (e.g. A-Z) or categories (e.g. upload to this category, defined by admin) (file types, doc/pdf/img, just the normal everyday file types)