New Trick for WordPress – Possible?

Hi all,

I’ve got a client who is enamored with WordPress (smart guy!) and wants me to do something really new (at least to me) with it:

He’s in network marketing and has a growing team of distributors. He wants me to build him a site that his distributors (existing and new) can then “purchase one just like it”, which would be hosted in a subdomain. He wants the content for their purchased sites to come from his site (for consistency of the message) and yet provide the ability for them to each blog separately (hence his idea that their sites should be replicas of his hosted in a subdomain). And of course, he wants as much of this process to be automatic as possible. Oh, and to make things really entertaining, the content of the main site will change potentially once a quarter, so then all the replicated sites will need to be updated accordingly, also as “automatically” as possible. Yee haw, eh? (Where’s the Easy Button? LOL)

In my pre-WordPress days, I have built sites like this (I call them replicating sites) and they’ve been really only one site (set of pages) that dynamically insert contact information of the proper distributor into the page based on a “member id” that is passed to a script, retrieved from a database and then displayed on the page. I’d recommend a structure like this to him, except he wants all of his distributors to be able to individually blog and have their own URL (for marketing purposes.) And he loves WordPress, so he wants them blogging in WordPress.

Sitting here, I can think of a couple of ways to approach this, but each of them have their issues and don’t get me all the way to the end product the client wants. To make matters worse (or at the very least more challenging), it needs to be a scalable solution because he’s got a couple hundred distributors right now and projects (based on his growth Y-T-D) that he’ll have over a 1000 by next summer.

I’m open to any creative solutions you all might suggest. The bare minimum requirements are: replicable, scalable and utilizes WordPress for blogging.

Yeah, I know…I don’t want much, huh?

Please reply before my brain melts and runs out my ears. ??

Thanks in advance,
Suzanne