If there is no administration of the slave site, then how do you manipulate the menu/articles?

ross

You have an slave site adminstration.
In your reply you have mentioned the specific case to have specific themes for the administrator.
The fact that you share the administrator themes provided by your master websites does not mean that you can not login as administrator on your slave sites and adminsitrate your slave site.

The only thing is that you can not install is a specific administrator themes (templates).
You can only select default administrator templates amoung the list of themes that you have installed on you master websites.

You can create menu, articles, or whatever with extension that you have autorized in your master wbesite using the themes (templates) that you have pre-installed in your master websites.

The slave sites are limited to what you have installed in your master website.
They can only select adminsitrator themes;
Re-install extension that have been pre-installed on the master websites;
etc ..

The only things that is open is the possibility to install front-end themes when you have selected to create a specific themes folder for your slave sites.
You can also have specific image and media folder for your front end.

I think this is the problem. I can't seem to login to my slave site as administrator.... it just brings me to my master site administration.

No this is not true.
Have a look in all the video in the tutorial and you will see that the admin is independent.
When you login in the slave site you have its specific admin.

If you arrive in the master webste, this is perhaps because you have not defined the slave site correctly (wrong domain name).

In my slavesite template (where I've now set the installation folder to 'unzip'), the administration folder is set as 'symbolic link'.

This seems important, as I think it's the issue. Should this be set to 'copy' or 'mkdir'? This way I can have an administration for my slave site.

Really, I don't understand what you are trying to do.

This is normal to have symbolic link on all the folders as the objective of JMS is to SHARE all the files and folders for all the websites.

This is not because you share the files and folders on the disk that you can not administrate your slave sites.
I remember you that the data of each websites if saved in the DB and that each websites has its own DB or at least a specific table prefix (when sharing the same DB ).

In each slave site administration you can have your own menu, own content (articles), ... and therefore I don't know why you want to duplicate (clone) the administrator directory.

If you want to duplicate the administrator directory, then you loose all the benefit of JMS as you will have to maintain yourself all the PHP codes of all the instance of joomla.
In this case, this will be moreless in the same case as if you install independent joomla for each websites.