webring setup assitance

I’ll state in advance that this got a little longer than intended – simply trying to express in detail my ‘vision’ in hopes of yeilding a more comprehensive/accurate answer. Thanks in advance to those that bother to read.

Hello,

After mulling it over for a number of years I’ve decided to go forth in launching a web-ring of sorts. I’ve hand-coded plenty of sites over the years and used a number of CMS systems. After about a year or so of not doing much with this hobby I’ve come back to find WordPress as a fully functional site publishing tool that breaks out of the blog niche!! Awesome !! I want to use it for my sites.

I’ve never set up something of this scale before and I want to do it right from the beginning. I’m hoping some veterans can chime in on the best method of going about things mainly from a point of efficiency as an administrator/editor.

The quick breakdown is:

Developer Site / hub ( parent site )

theme site 1 ( business )
theme site 2 ( environment )
theme site 3 ( comics )
((the idea is to start with 3 and grow form there as able to other niches/genre))

Secondarily, I don’t know yet if I should install a store cart (WP e-commerce appears to be the pick) in each site or have a central ‘network’ store and find a way to display the items on their respective sites.

The following is nothing ground breaking. Each with their own domain, focus of content, and look — but at the same time each uphold the ideals / mission / and attitude of the ‘network’, as well as some ‘standard’ features and style similarity to imply that they are part of a network.

So from a ground-up installation perspective what would be the best method for installing multiple sites but also under an ‘umbrella’ and in essence related ?

These are the options I could think – please tell me if I missed a viable option.

Do I need to install each domain with WP and maintain them individually ? ( annoying if you want to change 1 aspect of say, posting, and now have to login 4 times )

Or, alternatively, has anyone found it to be more viable to use subdomains under the parent site and place redirects on each theme primary URL to their respective sub domain?

http://www.theme1.com => theme1.parent.com

( did that make sense? )

Perhaps the same principle as above but use subfolders instead ?

http://www.theme1.com => http://www.parent.com/theme1

I hope I’ve been able to relay what my intention/hopes are and understand if the inconvnient route is the necessary one.

Thanks again for your time and any advice you can offer. If you don’t want to post here anyone is welcome to email me at zaksamba@gmail.com