WordPress MU

I want to give members on their blogs as few options as needed in their admin areas.

How can I customize, dress down, simplify member admin areas? Without messing up my own admin area?

edit: I see you can control this with the different user roles. Can I set a default somewhere that anyone who signs up for a blog gets the 'author' role?

I still have trouble wrapping my head around the theme loop, so where do I start? Where/how are the admin areas for the different user roles defined?

This is another preemptive question (sorry). I can't find anything on this in the forums, which isn't really surprising since it's a specific WPMU issue.

There is a WP standard plugin 'Admin menu plugin' which does not run out of the mu-plugins folder. Unfortunately I have not much clue of how to tweak the code to make that happen!
http://www.semiologic.com/software/admin-menu/

Not sure if the guy's willing to do some updates for it but it is still active (last update on July 20th).

The theme loop is kind of irrelevant since you don't need to know how it works unless you're designing a theme.

In the backend of MU, there's really two kinds of admins:
- the main site admin (that's you)
- the admin of each blog (the user who signs up)

You'll probably have to roll up your sleeves and dig aroudn in the code somewhere, possibly hacking something to set each new user to "author" on each blog. I will say it may make more support headaches for you though.

Either that or hack some of the menu to disply only if the Master-admin (that's you) is looking. To repeat: The Loop part of any theme doesn't have anything to do with the admin areas.

This article from the codex:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
may help some, but it is really written from the perspective of a stand-alone WP install. Some of the capabilities it talks about there for admin are not available to individual blog admins under MU.