building a true community of 200 sites

[Pardner Wynn]

David,

That was a very helpful response. Thank you! And that's great news 
about the shared member list.

As far as handling specific message types like Recipes,  I don't know 
for a fact they will actually want recipes per se, but they do need 
certain pages on their sites devoted to certain different categories of 
information, and the information on those pages needs to be tagged in 
the dbase as having a certain context (eg, "this is something called a 
'recipe', not a 'news' story).

So let's say
a) it's a page on their site where all the messages attached to that 
page are "recipes"
and
b) there's another page where all the messages attached are "community 
service work projects" (as in "we're cleaning Smith park up on 
Saturday, Please come and we're supplying free fried chicken for 
volunteers")

I'm pretty sure Frontier can let us set that up from a UI point of 
view. But we need the messages on certain pages "tagged" as belonging 
to different categories and filed on the correct page for that category.

1) There needs to be a way to search for "fried chicken" in the 
category "recipe" so, for example, you do NOT find the example (b) 
above where it contains the text 'fried chicken' but the context is not 
a recipe, but merely the fact someone's bringing chicken to a work 
party.

2) There needs to be a mechanism so a user can browse and search ALL 
the recipes, or a better example is, you have nothing to do on Saturday 
so you want to know if ANY of the 200 churches is having some sort of a 
work party this Saturday.

If you have any thoughts, please let me know!

Regards,
Pardner

>>  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. .