Long-term WP user, but a WPMU virgin needs some advise, if possible.
I've been running a website on a famous and rather prolific musician using WordPress as CMS for about five years and my audience appears not to be really smart. For example, they ignore the incredible amount of things the site offers in favour of whatever happens to be the newest news item on the front page and generally, there's some sort of link-blindness going on. Also, I enabled an advanced search plugin and got people complaining because they cannot search each single part of the website separately: e.g. only news (covered by basic search), only the interviews, only the songs' lyrics. Not to mention that there's a second WordPress install on the website offering an enormous amount of video clips, and that people don't visit it because I don't announce every clip uploaded on the top of the front page.
So, I thought about this for a while and decided to give a go to WPMU, but only if it turns out it IS what I am looking for. I have a bunch of (possibly annoying) questions and I do hope I can get responses.
Basically, from what I understand, WPMU installs have one main blog and there's an option to create a large number of sub-blogs, right?
Question 1:
I would like to convert the current primary installation of WP on the site to the main blog of the WPMU installation. The thing is - it uses too many plugins. Given that it's the main blog, does it matter if these plugins are WPMU-friendly or not? In other words, does the main install of WPMU function the same way a regular WP one does? I also have Gallery2 integrated with it, so that makes my concerns even bigger.
Question 2:
Is this still valid? http://bavatuesdays.com/importing-a-single-wp-blog-to-a-wpmu-installation/
Question 3:
After this, I would like to import the other WP installation as one of the "blogs". Should I repeat the steps under 2, given that this part of the site largely depends on wordtube plugin and needs it in order to function?
Question 4:
Do I really need domain mapping if I want e.g. only site.com and video.site.com?
Question 5:
Is the way to disable people from starting own blogs and actually knowing that I have WPMU as straightforward and simple as stopping them from registering to WP? I wouldn't want anyone to create any new blogs.
Question 6:
Will I be basically able to keep the current themes for each of the sites, those tailored for WP? I get it that I'll have to modify the main site's theme at some point to fetch newest items from the sub-site, but can it all go step by step?
Thanks in advance for any advice!