[NGO] Plone MultiSite?

[Shaun Hills]

I missed Ploneability, but I noticed there was some discussion around Plone
MultiSite. Having had a bit of a look at the code and docs (ahem ;) it seems
like it's a product for pushing content from a central "editing" instance out to
multiple other Plone sites. Is this a fair summary? Is there anything else it
does that I'm missing?

I have a reason for asking. We at NHS CFH run a fairly large but ultimately
quite bog-standard Plone site. And we're starting to hit two limitations of
Plone's out-of-the-box publishing model. Firstly content is all "up front" on
your site, and live the minute the owner hits "save". Risky. So we made a minor
customisation to default all new content to "Private"; at least then if it's WIP
it can't be found by users. But this has an unfortunate side-effect when users
forget to publish their content - they'll create a hyperlink to it which will
work just fine when they're logged in. But as soon as an anonymous user hits the
link, they're prompted for a login.

I think we need to get away from the current system and put in some kind of
staging or editing --> production propagation mechanism. Is this the kind of
problem MultiSite is intended to solve? Or should I be looking at one of the
other staging frameworks?

- Shaun