Thank you, mary, for taking note of the purpose of using /opt. I do have concerns about placing certain files in locations that may be compromised.
I have several ibays set up for domains/sites that do not warrant consideration for security. For the current case, MediaWiki is public facing but not open to public contribution. MantisBT is also public facing and allows limited input by the public. The other custom apps are not public facing in the sense of human readable content or browser access, being in the so-called "web services" vein and for this reason are not related to the Primary ibay or web site at all.
Some of the tasks I would like to pass to the assisting admin do fall into the category of "content", but the largest part of the effort will be in managing config, css and javascript files of the public facing apps, and the on-going maintenance of the m2m applications, written in python and c/c++. Hence, my questions.