WordPress MU

I work at an educational institution, and I've been tasked to find a blog application for use by staff and faculty. The blogs should be publically readable, and should be reached via "http://www.ourdomain.edu/blogs/place_name_here/".

I will be the main admin for whatever application is chosen.

I have no experience with using WordPress, but someone suggested that, given my need, I should go straight to WordPress MU.

I have already installed WPMU on my personal work computer. I already have some questions (concerning using "localhost.localdomain" versus a local network IP address set by DHCP).

Before I get any deeper, should I reconsider my course of action?

Your question is unclear.

Wordpress MU only works on on port 80. You cannot include the port in your Url.

It must be installed on a domain with a gtld or cctld.

These types of installs work:

yourdomain.tld
yourdomain.tld/blog/
blog.yourdomain.tld
blog.yourdomain.tld/blog/

These types of install do NOT work:

localhost
localhost:8080
localhost.localdomain
yourdomain.tld:4686

If you want to install it on your local computer you need to set up a domain like mylocaldomain.com on your computer in your /etc/hosts file like so:

127.0.0.1 mylocaldomain.com mylocaldomain.com

Then restart networking.

I would reconsider unless you're willing to put in a ton of hours to learn the system.

Honestly, I'd give the following a look. Same thing essentially, but minus all your countless hours and frustration in trying to learn not only WordPress, but then MU on top of it. They do the hard part, and you just manage your stuff.

http://edublogs.org/campus/

Yeah, I agree with Lunabyte actually.

Edublogs is a great service.

You'd have to probably use a dedicated subdomain name like blogs.yourdomain.edu unless you wanted to host your entire domain on edublogs.

Thanks for the suggestions!