Community News Platform – mini sites "on demand" . . .

[johnseagarand]

I am not sure, members of this forum, whether I am posting this request for guidance / information in the correct part of this forum or, indeed, if I am in the correct form at all.

If I am in the wrong forum or wrong area of the forum I sincerely apologise for this.

I have a very general question about WordPress. A friend of mine and I want to set up a website framework for community groups, of all descriptions, e.g. parishes, sports clubs, societies, towns etc to be able to publish their own free newspaper / magazine.

To this end, we have managed to acquire a very good domain name communitynews.ie.

Therefore, we envisage creating a website that will allow each community group to have a website with the URL format of: http://www.communitynews.ie/dublin ( for Dublin say . . . )

Obviously, we want to be able to create a website that, technically, would contain an infinite number of “mini websites” e.g.

http://www.communitynews.ie/dublin
http://www.communitynews.ie/cork
http://www.communitynews.ie/belfast
http://www.communitynews.ie/galway
http://www.communitynews.ie/howth_fc
http://www.communitynews.ie/cork_fc

etc.

We have been told that WordPress is “the way to go”. We have, ourselves, browsed through the various WordPress resources on the Internet and it appears that there are quite a myriad of magazine/newspaper themes that look really well and would really do the job.

It is intended that this would be provided as a free service while only the two of us are required to support it. But as we move along and, hopefully, it becomes more popular we may look at selling advertising on it.

However, it looks like these themes are for one organisation per website i.e. you have a magazine/newspaper WordPress for your club/parish/society and that is the only entity, as such, that is on that WordPress website.

However, what we are looking for would be in off a lot, we feel, more complex than this… We need to be able to “roll out” a new website for a potential new client OnDemand.

To this end, we feel that we would need some sort of control panel in the background that will allow us this sort of control.

Also we would like those groups to be able to send emails to a subscribed membership from their individual “mini website”

Also, when we get to the point of being able to sell advertising on the site we would like to be able to take advertising from a particular clientele of one of the “mini sites’ and put the advertising only on that mini site. For example, if John Smith is an electrician in Belfast and only wants to advertise to the Belfast area when we should be able to put advertising in http://www.communitynews.ie/belfast without it appearing on the other sites.

We have, loosely, thrown our ideas here on this page with the hope that somebody can give us some direction or maybe, for that matter, send us to a more appropriate forum in which to ask questions.

Perhaps, for that matter, some of you out there may know somebody that has done similar to this in other countries etc and who might be in a position to prevent us from “reinventing the wheel”…

All assistance greatly appreciated…

Kind regards

John