Okay man. I've been taking a look @ some Admin features and how I will implement them. There is also the question of which I should integrate user permissions into the core or make that a module but that would also raise the issue of having module dependant on other modules. Maybe have a global system define each time a module is loaded that way you can do
define("MYMODULE", "");
Then in each module do an ifdef or something and if it's defined use the functions that the module provides, dunno need more thinking time.
I just implemented placeholders for news administration and ported the login HTML to smarty which reduced it by about 20 lines.
I am cleaning up index.php (Where most of the core is) and considering making it more OO with an entire class dedicated to stuff inside the core. I don't know I'll read some articles on good OO design and then make this decision.
I have decided the core will have built in Page and Module administration (Starting, Stopping, Deleting, Creating, etc)