building a true community of 200 sites

[dbayly at udena.ch]

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003 16:43:28 -0800, pardnerw at lumify.com (Pardner Wynn) wrote:-
>  Message: 1
>  To: frontier-users at userland.com
>  Reply-To: Frontier-Users at userland.com
>
>  I'm attempting to figure out if it is possible for me to set up a
>  Frontier community that will host 200 individual churches that want to
>  share specific info across sites...
>
>  Each church wants its own site. Okay, that seems easy enough even for a
>  total newbie.
>
>  But can Frontier do this following, and if so, is there any
>  documentation available since I'm a newbie at Frontier (but otherwise
>  fairly technical):
>
>  1) They want to to share the registered user list. "Join one site and
>  you've joined them all" is the goal. Registered users of
>  ChurchNumber001 do not want to have to manually re-register at 199
>  other sites in order to access the functions reserved for members --
>  among other things, they'd probably end up having to pick something
>  like 20-30 different login names for different sites if their name is
>  common and already used on other sites.

This is called shared membership.  If you are running Frontier 9 the 
admin site allows administrators to configure this very option.  The 
text says

  Check this box if you want new sites to share their membership group 
with the hosting site



>
>  2) However, just because "Bob" is an Admin for Church #1's site does
>  NOT mean he should be anything other than a normal member for churches
>  #2-200 (unless they individually manually grant him that Admin status).

Yes editor status (managing, contributing, content)  is  private to 
site, regardless of shared membership.
>
>  3) They want to be able to create certain shared info. The simplest
>  example would be Recipes. Each church would post "their own" page with
>  their favorite recipes. But they'd also like to have a button that says
>  "show me ALL the recipes for ALL the churches."

That's possible, but involves considering some design questions 
before setting it up.

What is the difference between a normal message in a DG, and a 
recipe?  Is it that you will adopt a convention that says the message 
subject will contain Recipe? If the answer is  yes then a variant of 
the search engine will handle do what you want. If not, your solution 
will have to deal with multiple websites and that's a complication.

Or, you could make a single website that only contains recipes, and 
since you have shared membership  login is not an issue. Knowing that 
only recipes posted in that recipe website might make things too user 
unfriendly.

One tool that does handle structured stories like recipes nicely is 
the metadata plugin,  but it works on individual website basis. .

>
>  4) Similarly, they'd like to be able to Search across sites. As in
>  "show me all the 'fried chicken' recipes".

How about a search from the string 'fried chicken'. The search engine 
will do that for you

-- 

- David Bayly.       Programmer and digest reader.     dbayly at udena dot ch
  		Digest Readers do it once a day.