I'm looking for a means to control users' ability to post (and edit or delete) content within a specific path. Essentially, the client wants a group of subsites each with their subdirectory. All subsites should allow view access to all users, but only specific users would be able to create new content or manipulate the content in a given subsite.
For instance, everyone can view the content in clientsite.com/region1, but only users with the Region 1 Author role could post new content to appear there and only Region 1 Managers could edit or delete any content there.
My initial thought was the Domain Access module, but that won't work for subdirectories.
The next logical choice is to use the multisite functionality and set up each subsite as its own site. To get the access controls we need, though, would require sharing some tables and having some in different databases and could cause problems with searching for content across the subsites.