WordPress MU

Hi everyone, I have a slight problem that some of the more learned members amongst you may be able to help me with.
I am in the process of creating, for want of a better term, a webring IE one main website with multiple sites / blogs under it
http://www.my-domain.com
followed by http://www.my-domain.com/your-blog

The problem is, although I read many pages upholding the virtues of using wordpress MU, when I installed it and set everything up, I had terrible problems eg;
1.No registration page or link.
2. when creating a 2nd blog under the main blog, if I used the same title for a page it would not show on the menu bar.( my setup has page titles as a menu bar ) IE Culture, History, Geography etc
3. All sub blogs had no ability to change the header banner img (note: all using the same theme)
4. When using xml sitemap plugin, it only ever picked up the pages or posts of the main website (tried activating site wide, but then it just over wrote what was previously on the sitemap)
5. Similar problem with SEO plug in, it only seemed to work on the particular site/blog that I was working on at the time & would totally ignore all others.

Because the setup I am creating has the possibility of 100+ sub sites/blogs I thought that MU would be the way to go, yet because of the problems listed above I have now had to revert to a wordpress installation for each sub site/blog, which yes it is a waste of storage space having to have so many installations of the same files just in different folders / directories, but it is the only way I have found of being able to achieve what I need to have for each site / blog.

My Site If you check this out I think you will see what I am trying to achieve. If I am missing something with MU then please advise, or would I be better to stick with the method I am now using, although it does involve more work on my part, at least it is fully functional....???

Regards Steve

dunno what to say, you could simply use wordpress, i.e. one single installation and a category instead of blgos, so each category represents another city, so no multiple blogs needed, but yo ucould also do it with wpmu, I gues the problem was, wpmu is not as easy as wordpress, you need more patience and in-depth knowledge.

"1.No registration page or link."

It's always at wp-signup.php. If you change the theme form the default you have to put a link to it somewhere in your theme, where YOU want it.

"2. when creating a 2nd blog under the main blog, if I used the same title for a page it would not show on the menu bar.( my setup has page titles as a menu bar ) IE Culture, History, Geography etc"

A theme's menu bar pulls the page title of the blog it is on. It doesn't magically pull it from all blog. you need some fancy coding for that.

"3. All sub blogs had no ability to change the header banner img (note: all using the same theme)"

That's an issue with the theme itself. Look up "custom header" for themes.

"4. When using xml sitemap plugin, it only ever picked up the pages or posts of the main website (tried activating site wide, but then it just over wrote what was previously on the sitemap)"

You need a WPMU-specific one.

"5. Similar problem with SEO plug in, it only seemed to work on the particular site/blog that I was working on at the time & would totally ignore all others.""

Again, you need a WPMU-specific one. And plugin activate don one blog, only affect that blog.

please do some reading up at http://wpmututorials.com

Hey thanks for the info guys (oops sorry Andrea) & girls !

@ Ovidiu, yes I thought about using categories for the cities, however I need all cities to run independantly of the main site, therefore I didn't think that categories was the best way to go.

Anyway have finally got back to where I was 3 days ago & everything is working again albiet in a slightly wasteful setup. Oh and Andrea, yes I do realise that I should of sat down and waded through the numerous pages on MU, but unfortunately I am one of those people that learns much quicker by practical experience (hands on), I find that very often I have difficulty relating to what ppl are talking about when reading from a book or page of text. It's just the way I find it easiest to learn this sort of stuff.

Anyway thanks again for the advice maybe I'll try MU again at a later date.

Regards Steve