vlans and unmanaged switches
For the scenario like this: [managed switch 1, vlan0]-[unmanaged switch]-[unmanaged switch]-[managed switch 2, vlan0],
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Is it possible to have a vlan defined based on the managed switch 1 and 2? I guess it boils down what happens to the tagged frames at the unmanaged switches.
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If the answer for (1) is yes, will the devices under vlan be able to access the segments of the lan within the unmanaged switches?
There are 2 ways of handling VLANs.
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You have a physical port on a routing device and you tell it that any traffic that comes along with a destination header that matches your rule (such as 192.168.1.0/24, so all IP's between 192.168.1.0-254) gets sent down that cable. The switch will also helpfully add a VLAN ID to all that traffic so you now know which VLAN it belongs to. Also the switch is smart and ONLY sends it down that cable and nowhere else so the network doesn't get congested.
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This is more interesting to you. You setup a rule on your router; the rule says if the traffic matches the rule then it is given the desired VLAN ID. However because the switches don't know if that traffic belongs to a VLAN it has to be sent to a router to be processed and have the correct VLAN ID added to the header. Obviously sending all traffic through the router can cause a bottleneck, but there is hardware designed for this.
So in your case don't configure the port on your [managed switch 1] to do anything special. Just let it broadcast and the traffic should have no trouble reaching it's destination. By default all VLAN's can communicate with anything on the network as long as you send it to the correct IP. If you want to restrict traffic you setup firewall rules to block it as it goes through the router.