Hi everyone,
I am about to begin my new website, which will involve Multisite. Before I begin, I want to make sure I choose the correct architecture and install everything in the correct order. I also have a few questions which I need to have answered. I'm hoping you also have some suggestions for other extensions.

Here are all of the details I can think of:

- Nothing is installed yet, not even Joomla.
- I will be using Joomla 2.5 (latest).
- Slave site creation will only be done by me from the back-end (i.e. no front-end slave site creation).
- I want to create a templated site for different cities in sub-folders.

E.g. domain.com/newyork
domain.com/tokyo
domain.com/paris

etc.

- Users need to be shared across all sites, so that if a user registers for one site, he should have the same account on all sites.
- Kunena (forums) will be shared across all sites.
- Some banner ads will be shared across all sites, other banner ads will be only for specific sites. (Think of it this way: I want to sell both international ads and local ads to businesses for different prices.)
- Each site will have an events calendar that is NOT shared.
- The homepage (domain/index.php) will NOT be for a specific city, but instead will be a portal to the other (slave?) sites, and will include, for example, links to the globally shared forum and other globally shared features.
- Each city sub-site will have a similar theme with a few changes (e.g. different logo, different site name, etc.).
- To begin with, I will launch the site in 4 different city sub-sites. Later this year, I will want to create more city sites. In the future, I could have as many as 100-200 city sites.
- I know of several extensions that I want now, but I may add more extensions in the future, which would then need to be shared or installed on all city sites.
- Permissions for users will need to be different on each sub-site.

Questions:
1. Are there any red flags for what I have described above? Anything which can't be done?

2. Which architecture is best suited for my purposes and why: One database? 1 Master and 1 slave database? Or one database for each slave site?

3. What exactly is the purpose of the master/slave relationship? Are slave sites always just copies of the master site?

4. In my case, should the master site be the first city sub-site, or can it be the website for the portal at the root of the domain name (domain.com/index.php)?

5. Suppose that my master site is the first city sub-site (e.g. domain.com/newyork), but I want to have a portal at the root (domain.com/index.php) which links to the sub-sites and the globally shared components. Where would I link to the global forum? What I DON'T want is to have to link to the forum through the master site (e.g. domain.com/newyork/forum). Rather, I would want the forum link from the portal and from all sub-sites to be as follows: domain.com/forum How would I set this up?

5. I want to control which users will have access to do certain things on each sub-site. In other words, I would want to limit which users can post events in the non-shared calendar in each sub-site. How do I set this up? Can this be done using the new ACL in Joomla 2.5, or is there an extensions that someone can recommend?

6. In the User Manual, section 3.3.3, it states, The “Sharing” panel is used when you want to share the users or some extensions at the website creation. Be carefull that once a website is created, it is no more possible to change the option." Can you explain this? What can not be changed after a website is created? I don't quite understand.

7. Does anyone have any suggestions for extensions to use to manage global (shared) banner ads and local (non-shared) banner ads?

8. In which order should I install the components? Should I install all of the other components first, then MultiSites? Or Multisites first, then all of the other components?

9. Aside from JMS MultiSites component, which other JMS extensions do you think I will need and why?


Thank you!

Forgot to mention... My Host is HostGator. They allow any number of SQL databases.

Hostgator is OK and I will assume that you are using a cPanel.

The recommanded architecture is the one present in the tutorial video 0.b
www.jms2win.com/en/tutorial#jms12x-0b
We recently create new powerpoint for the joomla day strasbourg and that are currently available in the documentation section only.
www.jms2win.com/en/documentation/doc_det...-day-strasbourg-2012

Create a subdomain for the master website.
master.yourdomain.com
The location on the disk should be /home/account/domains/yourdomain.com/subdomains/master/public_html

Install the Joomla 2.5 in this directory and install JMS in this "master.yourdomain.com" website.
Put also a specific DB for the master.

Keep your cPanel "public_html" as empty as possible.

Install kunena in the master and all the extension that you may need.
Don't put any content in the extension.

Create a "portal" www.domain.com where you will put your portal (and all the users).
Create this "portal" into a specific DB.

As you expect to have a large number of "cities" (more than 25 / sometime 100) you will probably have to create specific DB for each cities and share the joomla users between the DBs.

Once you will have created a "fresh" portal, you will have to create a JMS template rule to share the portal and in particular select to share the users and kunena.
See tutorial video 16.
www.jms2win.com/en/tutorial#jms12x-16

As you mentioned that you want to have different permission between website, you also need the "partial user sharing" extension.
www.jms2win.com/en/joomla-multisite?page...52&category_id=1

Concerning the "template variant" like logo the solution depends on your joomla template. In your case, it seems better to keep the joomla template shared between all the website and perhaps ajust the location where the logo image is read. If this is hardcoded in the joomla template, you can change the location of the logo to provide a specific location for each website (ie. use a directory like image_specific/logo.jpg instead of a image/logo.jpg). So that you could continue to share the images directory and also have specific images directory.

1) No red flag. You can do that.
2) As many DB as websites because more than 25 sites.
3) Use the Symbolic Link - don't copy.
4) Master should remain "private" or confidential - not public.
Any slave site can be deployed in your cPanel primary "public_html" account.
5) We do not recommend to put any content into the master.
This is a repository or a library where you install all the extension - Not the content.
5b) Use the "partial user sharing" if you want to have different permission depending on the site.
6) The sharing is a decision take when you create the MySQL database tables.
Either you share the mySQL tables or you create a physical copy.
If you have decided to have website with their own users, you can no more change that because for example the User no 1 in Site A mean "jean" and the same number 1 in site B mean "paul".
You can understand the User number 1 has different meaning depending on the website.
When you share the user, this mean that User number 1 has only 1 meaning and can not have several meaning.
7) To share the banner, select an extension that can do that.
Becarefull that you can NOT both share and not share the content of a specific extension. So use different extension (one for the sharing and another one for the non sharing banners).
8) You can install the extension in any order.
We just think that is better to install all the extension before install JMS.
So that you will install the patches only once and not (perhaps) have to re-install patches after that an extension is installed.
9) The partial user sharing for the permission.