WordPress MU

Is there any reason I cannot have WordPress MU and Joomla operating on the same site without having them integrated together? I don't mind needing to log out of WordPress and logging back into Joomla depending on which kind of page I'm editing. Can I keep the two out of each other's way?

Here's some background on why I want to do this... I've got a church website that is about 90% hand coded HTML using an old copy of Dreamweaver 4. It also has about five WordPress blogs. I need to add more blogs and so obviously it's time to switch to WordPress MU and eventually I want to get rid of all of the hand coded pages so that the entire site can be updated from some kind of CMS and I don't need Dreamweaver or HTML knowledgeable users to update the pages.

Of course the biggest battle on the web is which is better WordPress versus Joomla and I give up trying to make sense of that. I've seen an expensive joomla plug-in that integrates WordPress MU and now I'm starting to discover there are WordPress plug-ins that integrate with Joomla but I'm not sure if they work and I don't want to be a beta tester... I just want to get my site working better.

Given the learning curve of trying to upgrade five or six WordPress blogs into WordPress MU and the hassle of trying to learn Joomla from scratch I'm not liking any of these solutions.

So what I want to do is switch to WordPress MU and perhaps create some non-blog pages using it. Then if I later find out I need a bigger batter CMS can I add joomla for some pages and not have it interfere with nor integrate with WordPress MU but simply coexist on the same domain?

I don't blog, I do multi web sites driven by MU. I would be happy to give advice or help you map out what you want to do. There is a plugin I saw while conversing with Andrea that allows MU blogs to have their own blogs (Andrea ??? where did I see it?). This would allow you to have your church site, or blog level one and pyramid down, not just a single layer down

Not pushing my way of doing things, but look at these three sites (and I have several wordpress sites that are not MU) and see if maybe my solution is what your looking for.

Also, do you need blogs or message boards. I have integrated bbPress into another real estate wordpress site, it never got used because I'm sorry to say, most Real Estate Brokers have trouble reading their email.

Look at

http://redhillsmedia.com
http://rhmpano.org
http://billjonesproperties.com
and for the bbPress addition (and it could be seamless, but why build it if it's not going to be used).

http://theselleradvantageteam.com look for the Brokers Exchange.

You're thinking of the multi-site plugin there Bill. :)

and I couldn't remember where I saw it, but did find it again. Thanks again.

There's a couple - a free one and a paid one.

A few bucks doesn't concern me. I'm stuck with assigning a copy of the same theme over and over because I use a rotator to display a variety of header jpgs that belong to each sub site. In a css file I don't know how to pass the blog.dr path as a variable. I will figure that out, but what will multi-site plugin do to complicate that???

I would like to be able to have each new "church" be a new subsite to the top level, but if you looked at what I have, one sub-site has been broken into thirds and I would prefer to have mt angle abbey as a child and have it have three children.

I'm good enough to modify what I find but not good enough to write it from scratch. Now if this was a clipper app!!! But now I'm showing my age.

I used to do esoteric complicated, but now prefer to strip down to the bare bones, much cleaner and tasteful in the long run. I always did like peanut butter and jelly.

"I will figure that out, but what will multi-site plugin do to complicate that???"

They still have a findable blog.id, just as the will correctly find their upload directory. The only difference is that the site id will be different, which doesn't affect themes at all usually.

Currently in the css file I use this code to do the image rotation.
'#header02 {
position:relative;
background: url(headers/rotator.php) no-repeat center top;
height:140px;
}'

In the header.php I then call it simply with
'<div id="header02">'

my ideal solution would be to have under blog.dr - blog-id a folder called headers and have the css file determine the url by the blogs id

since we have ventured from the original thread, should I post this as new topic?

Probably :)

At least it will be easier for future searchers.