Limiting Member's Role on Sites

Greetings all,
I am in the process of learning about wordpress, multisite, and s2member. It’s a lot to swallow all at once but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. But I’m not quite sure if I should configure my site as a multisite blog farm or not.

I want members of the “main site” to have a blog of their own. I want them to be able to create posts and pages and menus. But I do NOT want them to be able to change the theme or install plugins. And I do NOT want them to be able to create additional users on their site.

I have S2 installed but right now I’m allowing free account creations because I have not set up the Pay Pal infrastructure yet. When a new user goes to the main site and registers, they appear as a “subscriber” in the user list of the main site and as “Administrator” of the user list in the member’s site/blog. (I am using network/path sites instead of subdomain sites).

Because the member is an Administrator in the member site, he or she can do all the things that I specifically do not want them to do. So I’m trying to figure out what to do differently.

I think what I’d really like is for the superAdministrator to be listed as the Administrator role for the member site and the member’s user id to be listed as just an “Editor” of the member site.

Here’s my dilemma, it appears to me that the only way to automate the creation of a member site is to have “blog farm” enabled. But that makes the member the Administrator of the member site. On the other hand, I could turn “blog farm” off. Then I could manually create the site for the member, but set the super Admin as the Administrator and the member as an Editor role. That would get me what I want but I’d have to set up processes and forms for the members to request a site and I’d have to do it all by hand.

What I’d really like to be able to do is to turn “blog farm on”. And when the site is created, have the new site set up as I described above. (the Super Admin id is the Administrator of the new member’s site and the member’s ID is an Editor role in the new member site.

Any suggestions/insights into how to make this happen?

Hi Calvin have you found a solution to your problem yet? I am having a similar issue.