WordPress MU

Hi everyone (especially andrea_r).

After pulling out a good chunk of my hair out, I finally managed to get WP MU running. While I decided to go to the nearest drug store to get some Rogaine to get some of my hair back, this question has been bugging me...

Is there a way to systematically apply plugins and their settings to subdomain (i.e. child node) blogs?

I read that placing plugins into "wp-plugins" directory should achieve this but for some plugins that require input variables, you can hard code them. But there are some plugins that are way too user-input intensive that this isn't possible. For example, google sitemap XML plugin has some kind of cron thingy that you're supposed to tinker with. Not easy to hardcode.

So I came across this solution
1) use WP MU plugin manager to mass activate plugins
2) use YD WPMU Site-wide Options to replicate the "master" plugin settings to child blog settings

I have two questions..

1) Is there a simple way of doing this?
2) If not, how do I find out which "wp-options" parameter is associated with which plugin on Wordpress MU?

Thanks

Hi! *waves back*.

Currently there isn't a freely-available plugin that will transfer all plugin settings to a new blog.

So 1) is no. ;P

2) is... depends on the plugin. If the plugin author was smart, the field names are obvious.If you know how to code, you could hook in to the new blog creation process, grab the options from wp_1_options and stuff them in the new blog.