Beta Is Imminent

I have enough features coded to start beta testing. The software is still not complete; there are a few holes in the functionality, and there are a few known bugs, but I’d like to get a system up and running on the live web server at Dreamhost so I can iron out any deployment issues far in advance of the launch date.
Here are a few particular things I’ll be watching for:

Problems with SSL. I’m currently hosting jQuery and jQueryUI on Google, and those requests are non-encrypted, so I’m curious to see if that will work, or if I’d be better hosting jQuery locally.

PHP Configurations. I’m setting PHP configurations directly in my scripts; I’ll look into the possibility of installing PHP from binaries and configuring those settings directly in php.ini.

Performance. There are three concerns here. First, the wire transfer speed (what a technical term). I know that there are more HTTP requests on my pages than there needs to be. Combining CSS and JS, as well as using image sprites, will reduce the number of concurrent requests, but I haven’t done these things yet. Some pages are very JavaScript intensive and I’m interested in the client performance on older machines. Lastly, I have some rather complex SQL queries, and I’d like to see how the database performs when n gets big.

Usability. How easily will people be able to figure out how to use the software to perform specific tasks?

Unknown Bugs. I’m mainly looking for logic errors here. For example, today I just discovered that members cannot change their own passwords because they don’t have setSecurityRole permission.

File permissions. I want to make sure that users only have access to the files they need access to. On my development machine, all folders are writable, but that won’t be the case in production.

I just set up the SSL certificate on my server today. I anticipate launching beta by Wednesday!

I'd like to introduce my brother, the eminent psychologist, Niles Crane.

Frasier was eminent when my eminence was merely imminent.