Cloning GS sites to new domains

[grassfrog]

That is a good suggestion, however one you have a number of themes and plugins working on an instance, along with content and base metatgs, it's still more efficient to clone the site and then change the the elements to make it unique to the new instance. Otherwise, you're looking at FTPing the main engine, installing it, then adding the individual plugins (testing each time to make sure that they don't break anything). You can still clone over the themes directory from a main repository, but then there is still the issue of getting the original instance's content copied over without causing anything to break or throw an error.

Maybe I'm asking too much, but copying over an entire instance then changing the file permissions & ownership still seems to be a reasonable and logical method for creating additional GS sites. I just need to figure out how to keep it from throwing an error message under Settings.

Yeah, uploading an unzipped GS can be a pain depending on the server. I usually do it via cpanel.

I suggest you use some temporary php script to uncompress your GS zip file directly on your web server. Googling for "php unzip server" should give some examples...