Thanks @haystack for walking through the various options.
Yes, we are looking for a “community as a service” solution (thank you for giving us that terminology :)). Since we are starting with a clean slate, I am trying to install and configure my way through a final decision on whether we should go with a multisite or single site installation option.
The latter (single site install for each community) does give us many advantages such as independent member community, badging, and so on. However, it also has other disadvantages. One example is the group blog. The Buddypress Groupblog plugin only works with the multisite installation. Are there no options to enable group and individual blogs other than switching to a multisite and enabling bp group blog? I guess that is a question that deserves a separate topic thread…
The documentation is good at describing how individual component works. I am trying to get to a decision about the whole from those parts. Hope that explains it.
Many thanks again for the thoughtful response and questions.
