WordPress MU

I have an idea, yet I'm not sure if I should use regular WP or MU. Here's a very basic outline of the idea:

I'd like to offer a particular city the ability to post blogs about the city, that are all aggregated on one site. The look and feel of the initial pages would be something like the really nice MU installation at http://blogs.weightwatchen.com/, highlighted her in this forum.

However, I don't want this to be a support nightmare. As such, I'd like to restrict the blogs to one theme that I have set up and they cannot touch. It's a city with lots of people opining all the time about local issues, and the ability to state their opinions and prompt discussion is what they are after, not the customized blog. If I can do this with MU perhaps this is the right approach. Can I set it up with these restrictions?

But, I could also accomplish almost the same thing with WP. Each author I approve could make their own posts and people could click on the author links in the sidebar to access all of the posts from that author; this would be much like his own blog, except it would be missing things like blog title, the ability of a user to subscribe to only that author's posts, and some other things.

Without getting into too much more detail at the moment, I'd just like to set a direction for myself. Any comments which way I need to go?on what

Yep, MU would be perfect for that.

Can I restrict this at will with ease, or are there plugins for this, or is it hacking the code (hate that). And what can I restrict? For example, some things under the options I'd not want them to touch, like permalinks, some Reading options like the "front page" stuff, etc. I want consistency and as little support as possible.

I guess the plugins and templates can be restricted simply by what I put in the directories -- one template and no plugins.

I contacted the developer of weightwatchen.com to see if he would be interested in a development job, as his site resembles what I'm looking for in structure. If any others here have the interest and the ability to help create a similar site (not competitive to that, just similar in its structure -- but don't need the blog integration), please let me know.

"I guess the plugins and templates can be restricted simply by what I put in the directories -- one template and no plugins."

Yep, that's it exactly. the other menu options can be restircted with a light hack, but there may be a plugin out there. can't remember. You'll have to search the forum as I know it's been discussed.

I didn't see a plugin that would restrict things like permalinks and other smaller items they should not be messing with. I'm surprised that at least the permalinks is not restricted as the owner of a site surely would like to control that for SEO purposes.

A plugin's not needed. Just remove the menu link and put a die() at the top of the permalink.php file.

The permalinks change just fo rthe one blog the user has, not the whole site.

but drmike's suggestion also works, or you could add the is-site_admin at the top of those pages you didn't want them to see, and leave it for you to tweak.

Are both of these suggestions hacks that require me to redo them after each upgrade of software, which some suggest doing nightly with the new builds?

Yes.

But! The people who are doing daily updates are not upgrading every single file, just the ones with changes. Thus, if you've only edited a couple of files in the backed, it's easy to keep track of.

Ahh...okay.

I'm thinking of trying it out. But here is my dilemma. I have a typical shared hosting account, and while I can create an "add-on" account, I'm told this is no good, even for testing it out. I hate to go pay for an expensive account in case MU is not right for me, but what would be the lowest level account type I could purchase for a month to try it out?

Also, who are some of the members here that can be hired to help with setup/development?

Oh forgot to ask, can I set it to approve new blogs before they go active? Or is htis another hack?

The absolute cheapest way to testdrive it is set it up locally on your computer. It's free.

Also, there's no approval process for new blogs. I dunno if anyone's even written and released a hack for it yet.

*chuckle* Approval process is to check each one as they get setup. There's a hack here on getting an email when a new blog is created. Someone's going to have to find it for you though as I can't open new windows on this terminal.

I'd need an approval process since the nature of what I'm doing requires semi-intelligent people who will contribute to the project as a whole--like a massive magazine sort of.

And with my Adsense on it, I could just see people pissed that they don't get to write, start screwing around with the clicks to get me kicked off.

put a redirect in the top of wp-signup that redirects them to a "custom" form on your site that mimics the signup process.

Then, create a blog in the back end (or add a user) if you want to "approve" it.