Before you start

Having cache turned on is a great thing if you have lots of anonymous users. Are there scenerios where having it turned on could be disadvantageous? Why are site admins given the option to turn it on or off?

I have a project that requires managing three blogs and one e-commerce site from one instance of a CMS and one db. All the sites have separate domain names. The blogs require a full set of blog features such as can be seen in Wordpress. So I'd like to find a great CMS (Drupal looks to be one, as does Mambo) that allows me to publish to all 4 sites from one place, sharing some users and some db records between all of them but not all users or all db records.

With regard to blog functionality:

I note the discussion about blog functionality in Drupal to be found in the discussion, "integrating Drupal for Bloggers" (http://drupal.org/node/9059), and take from that discussion that the blog component that comes with the core Drupal installation is meant more for allowing multiple users of a Drupal-created site to have their own space in which to express themselves, but it is not for creating full-featured blogs. Do I understand this correctly? And if so, would incorporating Drupal4Bloggers (http://james.seng.sg/wiki/wiki.cgi?Drupal_For_Bloggers) into a Drupal installation solve this problem (problem from my perspective; I understand some Drupal users are happy with Drupal's built-in Drupal solution).

With regard to managing multiple sites (blogs or otherwise):

I note that between the project, "Multisite Configuration Patch (with site-specific modules and themes)" (http://drupal.org/node/5942), and the article in the ADMINISTRATORS' GUIDE in the DRUPAL HANDBOOK, "Database table prefix (and sharing tables across instances)" (http://drupal.org/node/2622), it appears my multi-site, single CMS instance/one db issue can be neatly addressed by Drupal. Is that correct? Does anyone have successful experience doing what I need to do with Drupal in this regard?

Is there an easy way to allow a user to edit a node, but not delete it? I know that might sound wierd, but I have a site where there are a few defined sets of several pages that are created by a main admin, and then the editing duties are passed off to another admin who is just in charge of day to day updates for a particular set. I could just make sure the update admins are trained not to delete the nodes, but I would like to just remove that possiblity altogether.

I was wondering how the distributed authentication feature is affected by the user banning feature.

If one site using the system bans users with certain IP numbers or email addresses, does that filter through to other sites using the same database? What about if the "hub" site implements such bans?

How do I even download the file? When I extract the .tar file.. it has all these weird files with 0 KB.

I was getting ready to install this on 1and1.com but the warning message reads:

* Please note that the MySQL database may not under any circumstances be used for log evaluation operations, ad clicks, chat systems, banner rotations, or similar applications putting extreme loads on the database.

Would this constitute as a chat system?

I don;t want my hsot to shut me down.

I am sending them an email to ask I was wondering if I could get a quicker answer from here tho first.