I'm a newbie in need of some guidance...
I have several commerce sites. I want to create a social networking community and have it be interactive with my commerce sites.
Specifically we're intending to do several Blogs, multiple Chat rooms (both public and private) and a Question/Answer site. We'd like it to look like our existing commerce sites, so that users moving back and forth between the social network site(s) and commerce sites are unaware they're leaving one and entering another. And most importantly, we want users to create a login (user/password) and have this single login give them access to both blogs, commenting on blogs, and chat rooms. (I want to avoid captchas... they're personally frustrating for me, so I don't want to force them on all my users.)

None of it needs to be really elaborate... straightforward. Simple. Easy to administer and manage. Easy to get up and running. There are 2 of us doing this and we're both computer savvy, have built websites and built computers, but neither of us is a programmer and we want to be able to (for the most part) install and manage it ourselves without needing to hire programmers every time we need to make a change or add a function.

Help. there's so much out there and the more we try to figure out what to do the more bogged down in the decision we're getting. I just want to get to the blogging part!