Best format for cms's user table?

[Xallien]

I am quite aware that this is more of a design issue than anything, but I\'m creating Yet Another CMS and wondering what the best format for the storage of a user\'s data would be. Any insights people have had on this topic?

 

A few example questions to express what I mean:

- What should be the maximum size of the user-id field?

- The efficiency of creation, modification, and access dates?

- Password / encrypt / md5?

- Reasonable signature length cap?

- Avatar BLOBs?

- Seperate user-prefs table?

- etc.

 

I hope you get what I mean. I just want to see what the most efficient design would be before I commit any user table to being the core of the system.