I'm using the (your) new blog defaults plugin to set the default category (from Ungategorized).
I'm using the default categories plugin to copy a set of ~10 categories to all blogs.
http://natureofmind.org/30/default-categories-for-new-blogs/
(would be great if you could integrate this into your plugin!)
I'm using sitewide tags to pull in a copy of each new post, and then using the shared categories as a way to sort the content.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/
I assume you mean this, for the '3 in 1':
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tabbed-widgets/
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Here is my issue, either all posts go to the main blog or all posts will go to a sub blog (/tags). If they go to the main blog, posts that might be uninteresting will pop up on the home page.. If I send posts to the sitewide tags blog, they are now a 'level deep' and in a separate blog (and not on the home page - but still "unintersting").
What I now need to find is a way to rate a post, or at least mark it as "homepage worthy" -- this ideally needs to be done BOTH at the (/tags) blog and at the original permalink location. Meaning, the post could be rated from anywhere, but the rating would be stored in/on the post.
I'm looking into the post indexer plugin as a way to do this..
I could then create a threshold list for the homepage that says rated 5 or higher..
Ideas?