The second part of my general plan is informational. This isn't totally disconnected from the interactive part, of course, but the focus is a little different.
The informational side will consist of these areas:
Communities Each community will have its own page. This page will list general info about that community as well as have a tracker of posts tagged with the community.
Directory. This is sort of like a phone book in that it will list all the area businesses. In addition, it will list parks and other attractions. Since I'm interested in making this site useful more than making money, adding a link will be free, though I'm thinking of offering better positioning for paid links using the sticky option.
Events Local events, including an event calendar. I haven't decided, yet, if I want to use the event module or go with a CCK/views combination.
I'll be using CCK to make a few custom types. Communities, Events and Parks will each get their own type due to the specific details I want recorded. Businesses, restaurants, attractions, and "other" can probably share a content type and just use categories to differentiate. I can't decide what to call this content type... It's one of those niggly things that just keeps eluding me. I'd welcome any suggestions. :)
My original plan was to use the category module primarily because it makes terms into nodes which is perfect for the community pages. After trying it, though, I decided the code just isn't ready for production use. So I've decided to use regular taxonomy. To simulate the terms as nodes functionality, I've added URL aliases to link each community term's page to the proper community landing page. This is a lot more work, but only needs to be done once for each community. I may revisit the category module sometime in the future, but this will work for now.