Hello, welcome. For the most part, b2evolution will do what you need. A couple of those things will take a little work. Here's a run-down:

1. Main page - Yes, this feature is built in. Blog 1 is the aggregator blog, which shows posts from all blogs, authors and categories.

2. Category pages - This is not built in. The software has no sense of categories that span multiple blogs. Categories are considered to be contained within blogs. I'm sure you could hire a programmer to add this feature, but it's not built in.

3. Author pages - Yes, this is built in. Sorting posts by categories within an individual blog is built in, too.

4. Forum/Comments - b2evolution supports comments. They may suit your needs with no modification. If you want to integrate it with some third party forum software, that would take some work.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply! Yes, the sort by category across blogs seems to be the kicker for the others I've tried as well (i.e. Nucleus, etc).

Is it the type of thing that would be difficult to code? I'm not really sure how the databases work.

Thanks!

I'm not sure how difficult it would be to code. Each category is a row in a table with an id, name and blog_id. Most of the work is done using the id numbers, so giving two categories the same name doesn't really tell the software that they're related. Changing that would require either adding a new table that keeps track of which categories are related to which, or somehow using the category name to get results instead of the id. This would make it behave a little more like a tagging system instead of a category system, which is something that some people have asked for.

If you want to hire somebody to make the mod for you, write up a proposal and a price range that you're willing to pay. I'm sure someone smart will be up to the task. If not I may even give it a try.

I believe if you turn cross-posting on then any category you create would be available to every blog on your site (I could be wrong, though). I'm not sure if there are other undesirable consequences to turning cross-posting on, however.

Yes, Nate is right. This would work well. The only downside is that each user would have to remember to post it to the Dogs category on their own blog and the Dogs category on the Blog All blog.

It's a good idea, but unfortunately I doubt the people who are posting would be willing to do that. I guess I'll have to look into a custom job.