WordPress MU

Hello, everyone! I'm moving from blogger.com to WordPress and I've got a couple questions. For clarity, I'll refer to Wordpress MU as "WPMU" and the single version simply as "WP".

I currently have three blogs all of which reside on my webhost. I don't imagine that I'll have more than three, and I will never host blogs for other people.

Ideally, I would like http://www.domain.com to refer to my main blog, foo.domain.com to refer to my second blog, and bar.domain.com to refer to my third blog.

My MAIN question is this:
Is WPMU overkill for my needs?

If you answered YES to my main question, then:
With WP, I have to install three separate installations, correct? With each of the common plugins installed in each installation? Is this as much of a hassle as it seems? Would it be better to use one installation of WP and use tags to differentiate between three "virtual" blogs? And does this mean that I will have to use the same template with all three

If you answered NO to my main question, then:
Is there a way to set a "default" blog that displays when someone goes to domain.com as opposed to an introduction page?

Thank you so much for your help. I'm totally out of my element here and appreciate your advice.

If you're coming from blogger to WP, then either way is going to be difficult for you. :)

I think MU is a bit of overkill if you want three blogs, myself.

Thanks for the response, Andrea! As a PHP programmer, I actually haven't had any issues moving from blogger to WP other than the import.

So are you suggesting that I install three copies of WP or is there a multi-blog add-in for WP that would help me out?

There isn;t a multi-blog add-in for WP, which is why many people are trying MU.

I'll tell you, MU would do it easy with less mods than 3 installs of WP. BUT you;d need to get it installed first. That's the tricky part.

(but hey! you know php! head and shoudlers above the rest of the usual moving from bloger to WP)

Thanks! I've already got it installed and running, but I didn't want to invest a lot of time into it if it wasn't the best solution (or as another member put it, killing a fly with a sword).

Is there a way to set a "default" blog that displays when someone goes to domain.com as opposed to an introduction page?

Pick a new theme. The sign-up process is only in the "home" theme.

12centuries: there's also a solution for WP (the single Wordpress) to make it work for a few more different domains with one codebase. Unfortunately i don't remember the URL where the tutorials resides but apart from that i think it was german. maybe you can find it using google.

Thanks for the great responses, everyone. One last question:

Is there anything that I will be losing by going with MU? For example, do all of the WP plugins and themes tend to work in MU without problems?

Most plugins work, only some require tweaks. But that's only if you want to implement them sitewide in the mu-plugins folder. Those changes are fairly simple and apply those plugins to all those blogs you have (but without the activation buttons, so to deactivate you have to remove them).

Ones that go in the plugins folder would need to be activated seperately for each of the sites. But should all work the same as if you had seperate wordpress installations.

Oh, the default theme can be picked for all blogs, including the main one. You can just pick a standard one. They pretty much all work if they're coded nicely.

Excellent help! Thanks for the detailed info, pumpkinslayer :-) Thanks to everyone for the help. I'm going to use MU. It only lacks the import from Blogger, but I have very few posts over there, so it won't be a major chore to transfer the data.

Hey, here's an idea:

Perhaps I'll take the time to write a PHP program that pulls the info directly from Blogger API and inserts them into the Wordpress database. I've already written programs to integrate with the Blogger API, so it shouldn't be to difficult.

Does anyone think this is something other people could use?

I'm running the most recent wpmu and my import menu lists Blogger.

Uh, yeah... the Blogger import has been there for a while.