I know people have used DNN for large scale web sites, so someone out there must know a strategy to deal with this concern ...

The site my company is developing will be quite large, with many pages.  There will be a standard design structure dictating what will appear in the right pane of every page. For simplicity's sake, let's say the same Announcements module will appear on every page.

To accomplish this, obviously we must create one initial page, drop the module into it, and then copy that page and its module instance for every other page of the site.

But in the future we may choose to alter the standard structure regarding the right pane.  For example, what if we choose to also add a FAQ module to the right pane of every page?  It would seem that to do this, we must drop the new module onto one page and then manually copy it over EVERY SINGLE page on the site. Not such a problem for 12 pages, but a little more troublesome for 200.

I know about templates, but in my understanding they only affect a page's initial disposition.  Changing a template would not retroactively change the pages that have already been made from it.

It also seems that custom skin objects approach what we're looking for.  However, we want these common elements to have true module functionality - able to be edited in the typical way by certain users like any module. I do not see that it is possible to marry this functionality with the concept of skin objects.

Like I said, there must be someone out there who has dealt with this. So put me on the right track; what technique do we need to be looking into?

It would be great if we could use "Display on all pages," but unfortunately matters are a tad more complicated.  I simplified the problem for the sake of presenting it clearly, but in actuality each page on our site will belong to one of many sections.  So things are made difficult by the fact that we may want the same type of module (i.e., FAQ) on all pages, but all pages in one section would contain the same module instance, all pages in another section would contain a different instance, etc.

The Shadow Content module seems to me to behave much in the same way as simply copying a particular module instance from one page to another, just without the ability to edit it from any page.  At any rate, it doesn't seem to solve the problem of needing to add a module to many existing pages at once.

As for the last suggestion, I will have to examine it more closely.  But am I understanding correctly that this would just be using down-and-dirty SQL to directly update the database records, rather than use the DNN interface?  I'd consider this as an option, but isn't it somewhat ill-advised to directly alter the SQL data this way?  I'd appreciate a few opinions on whether this is a common way to implement changes in your DNN sites.

Now that I've brought up the concept of multiple "sections," each with their own common content, surely I'm right in thinking it would be a pipe dream to add one module type, but different module instances for each section, to all pages of the site with one broad stroke?  For example, if I want to add a FAQ module to the right pane of all pages, but one shared instance for the Products section, one shared instance for the Forums section, etc . . . I'm assuming I'm stuck with, at the very least, manually adding the module to at least one page in each section?  (I suppose, if I am in fact cracking open the datasource itself, I might be able to affect a stored procedure . . .)

The main point is:  for all this I'm looking at working outside the bounds of the DNN admin interface?

I am a developer and definitely capable of using direct SQL access as described.  I just wasn't aware that was a common or encouraged approach, considering that DNN "sets itself up" and is administered through the interface.  I'm just hoping to probe a few people's opinions on whether this is/should be done routinely.

I do want modules on multiple pages to pull their content from the same source, but I'm talking only about the functionality that is accomplished by using "copy from existing page" when adding a module to a page.