Multisite Worpress Environment / Community

[webindustry]

Hello fellow SEOMOZ rs.

We are building out a platform on WordPress that provides a free blog for a market niche in a multi-site WordPress environment. The client we are building this solution for now wants the people signing up for the free blogs to be able to search for each other (based on categories and keywords), to build a list of favorites from other bloggers in this community (sort of like building a team), review each other (leaving a publicly viewable review and score of each other) as well as create a forum that is outside the blogs that each of them have.

Here is a summary of the goals for the WordPress Plug in (s)

1. Search for other sites within the multi-site environment
2. Scoring / Review system for other users (who also have blogs on the system)
3. Ability to build and maintain a list of other users in the community (like a prefered list or team list)
4. A shared Forum area that we could admin from the multi-site platform that they could log in with using the same credentials as their multi-site blog credentials.

My question for you all is:

Does anyone have experience in a single plugin that will work in a multisite environment that would handle some or most of the goals listed? If not a single plugin, how about recommendations for individual plug ins that might help with this?

Thanks for any recommendations!

[Sean_Dawes]

Have you looked into using buddypress at all? Think this will accomplish most of what you are looking to do.

http://buddypress.org/

You are able to have forums, blogs, private messaging, groups as well as feature content on a site's homepage.

Here is an example of a site on buddypress:

http://tastykitchen.com/