building a true community of 200 sites

[Patrick Ritchie]

Hi,

> 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.

Yes, that's easy ;) Here's a link to the relevant docs: 
http://frontier.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$10600?mode=day

> 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).

Each site will have an idependant managing editor, content editor and 
contributing editor list.

> 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."

Hmm... this one is a bit harder. Very doable but might require some 
custom work, maybe someone else could chime in here?

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

You can easily enable searching across all your sites w/ Frontier's 
built in search engine. You can configure your search engine at 
http://yourserver.com:5336/settings?page=1.5

And you can enable indexing of individual sites at 
http://yourserver.com/site/admin/sitePrefs/default$searching

> 5) Having some sort of aggregate calendar of events, perhaps at some 
> top-level site, would be very very desirable. "What's going on 
> anywhere this weekend?" It would be nice not to have to browse 200 
> sites to find out.

The default Manila calendar is an archival calendar, ie: it lists past 
news items. But Marcus Mauller's Calendar Plugin should do some of what 
you want, http://plugins.weblogger.com/discuss/msgReader$150.

Hope this helps!

Pat