General Site Setup Assistance

Hey all, I've been trolling the Wisconsin group for a bit, and was hoping someone with some more experience could help me wrap my head around this problem.

The Setup

There is one "corporate" site. It has recipes in a variety of topics.

There are 8 "franchise" sites. They should be able to show the same recipes as corporate, but as if they were their own. Each franchise site wil also have a few of their own pages, such as About Us, Contact Us, Specials. etc, each editable by people specific to that store.

I'd like to avoid subdomains for the franchise sites, and would love them to have URLs like this:

www.corporate.com/franchise1/recipes/bread <-- list page of recipes tagged with bread
www.corporate.com/franchise2/recipes/awesome-banana-bread <-- view the awesome banana bread node

and it shouldn't matter if they were at franchise1, franchise2, etc, those would all be data from corporate.

However, www.corporate.com/franchise1/about-us would be different from www.corporate.com/franchise2/about-us

My original plan:
Make some views with paths like:
/%franchiseName/recipes/categories <-- to list all the same recipes, however, you can't use a % as the first term in an view path, which made that plan go to hell pretty quickly

then i went with stuff like:
/recipes/%franchiseName/categories <-- and just not do much/anything with that argument, but you can probably imagine it got ugly quickly, because I found myself having to rewrite links ugly all over like /recipes-by-category/%franchiseName/category/bread

I gave up with that plan when I couldn't figure out how to link to an actual recipe node with an argument to "remember" what franchise site we're on.

So, my questions - is there a better way to set up what I'm trying to do? Could Organic Groups be utilized? I dismissed it because it sounds like a tool for a totally different concept, but it keeps getting brought up again and I've never used it.

I've been pointed to Domain, which will probably work, but I think it requries i use subdomains for the franchise sites, such as: franchise1.corporate.com/recipes/bread Is this correct? Does Domain (Access) sound like what I want to use here?

I'd love any other ideas on how to set this up, as it seems like it'd a far-from-rare type of situation.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts, and I do hope to start attending the downtown coffee shop meetups soon, but I'm sans laptop atm :( :( :(

I feel like this is a great TYPE of discussion I can never seem to find enough information on. Is there a better place to see how to use Drupal to set up different 'types' of site models?

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