WordPress MU

Hi, I have around 40 undeveloped domains that I have parked with ads on it. I dont get much out of parking, so I thought why not develop them, promote them and get some useful traffic and then put adds also.
But I really do not have patience to develop 40 individual websites.

Now, I have 2 options, develop all 40 websites with 40 wordpress installation or somehow use WPMU to do the magic.

Can, WPMU single installation, take care of 40 domains pointing to it. If yes how ?

yes, and if someone answers this question with any amount of depth, i'd be very appreciative.

I politely suggest doing a search for 'domain mapping' as it's been discussed a couple of times already. It's very doable within wpmu.

Try this, I just made this based on drmike's original post.

http://bui4ever.com/web-itecture/wordpress_mu_with_domain_mapping/

That is awesome, thanks for the step by step instructions for us idiots.

If you use the plugins, what steps could you skip?

Actually the steps to do this is quite complicated. I figured it would be nice to have a nifty reference :).

If you install the plugin, you don't actually get to skip any step. It's just more convient to access everything in your Site Admin versus Site Admin and CPanel.

Are you talking about this plugin http://www.wpmudev.org/project/Multi-Site-Manager/ ?
I couldn't find any instructions on how to achieve domain mapping using this plugin.

Also, since we are mapping domains here, wud it not work with http://www.mywebsite1.com/abc (sub-directory) type of structure. My host doesnt allow wildcard subdomain setup.

I came across this interesting article - http://www.attackr.com/host-multiple-wp-sites-on-one-installation/
Can someone discuss on this please. Seems too good/simple to be true. I will also try to experiment with this and post the results.

There's nothing to it, really. It's not like mu, it's very similar to what I posted last summer on wordpress.org about doing the same thing. Granted, it's revised to pull the table prefix from the domain, but same thing.

You install WP as many times as you want with different table prefixes (based on the domain), but only have to use a single set of files. There isn't any global features, and each blog is no different administratively or visually than a single wordpress install.