WordPress MU

I'm launching my first MU site (fishingspots.net) and am in the planning stage needing some advice.

The site will have a limited number of blogs and they'll be by state. So there will be fl.fishingspots.net, tx.fishingspots.net, ca.fishingspots.net etc.

Users will be authors and not blog owners for this project.

While I read that sidebar and other elements are passed to all blogs on the site, I need to have them be different because I'd like to have an email opt-in that is different for each site. So the fl.fishingspots.net blog would have an email optin that would add people to a Florida Fisherman list.

I thought that perhaps, to get different items to show in the sidebar, footer, and other areas of the site, I could have a plugin created that would would create a control panel in each new blog accessible only to admins.

This control panel would have fields for blocks of code that would be unique to each blog and the theme could then be tweaked to pull whatever code was in those fields for display.

Thus I could plug into the Florida Fisherman Aweber opt-in form code into the control panel on the fl.fishingspots.net and it would be called to display in the sidebar there but nowhere else and the Texas Fisherman Aweber opt-in form code would display the sidebar of tx.fishingspots.net and nowhere else.

Is this something that can be created?

"While I read that sidebar and other elements are passed to all blogs on the site, I need to have them be different "

Use widgets. Go into each blog, make sure the sidebar is widgetized, then in the back of, say, the Texas blog, set up a widget with the opt-in form.

And you don't need to have widgetized areas in just the sidebar, they can be anywhere.

Sidebar elements are customizeable on a blog by blog basis by default, provided the theme is widgetized (most are).

The opt-in form plugin can be one plugin or it can be separate plugins as you require. For an example of doing it with one plugin, try the Subscribe2 plugin.