WordPress MU

It's difficult for me to tell which version of Wordpress to use, even after reading the MU sticky about whether it's for you. Yes I'll invest time, have the development skills, etc. Here's the goal -

I have one main domain, e.g. sports.com. I have a couple of other variations that I'd like to use to put up posts for different areas but have integrated logins so that a user doesn't have to login to each and every site. So sports.com is a catchall general area. sportsnfl.com will be a category that has mag articles only dealing with american football, sportsnba.com deals with basketball, sportssoccer.com is soccer articles, etc.

It's difficult for me to discern the pros and cons of using MU versus the "multidomain hack" and I'm hoping that someone who has experience can give me just a good idea as to the reasons I'd use one or the other and potential drawbacks and pitfalls. There is also the danger of using masking so I wanted to simply get the front page of each "journal" and the related articles to be on each particular site with a tie in to the main site, sports.com. I'm sure there are other variations or ideas and sharing those would also be most appreciated.

Thanks for all comments in advance, truly.

If it were me, here's what I would do.

use WPMU.

Start with sports.com and set up nfl.sports.com, soccer.sports.com, nba.sports.com, jamacanbobsledding.sports.com.

And that's all built-in to MU. Added bonus is if you're logged in to sports.com, you're logged in to all the subdoamins as well. Adding a new sports means a couple clicks in the backend. making the main site a catchall has been covered countless times here too, so you know that works.

The "multidomain hack" you're referring do can be easily done with the domain mapping plugin, so that's no biggie either. If you really wanted separate domains for each sport.

The up side of using MU over single WP is each site is separate. If you use one install of WP and categories, I think it'd be too cluttered, and I have no idea how'd you'd run multiple domains off that. Multiple installs of single WP is doable, but then you have a bunch of them to look after.

Drawbacks: some plugins don't play nice with WPMU. Decide if there's plugins that are a must-have and do some research.
If you're unfamiliar with how regular WordPress works, the learning curve for MU will be steeper.
If you expect the site to be of any size or popularity, expect to pay for appropriate server space, not a $5 / month job. :) (just sayin'...)

Andrea - many thanks for your detailed reply. You've got exactly the idea of what I want to do and it seems MU is the answer. The multidomain mapping seems perfect - the key with some of my domains are that they are actually phrases, e.g. sportsagents.com and sportsannouncers.com so that for SEO purposes it would provide an additional boost of catching keywords you wouldn't get with agents.sports.com. I could always set up the subdomain but prefer to use the plugin you've mentioned.

Yep, I read about some of the plugins that just don't play nicely with MU and hopefully most of the problem ones won't affect me. I also have a dedicated server that has some real power so I'm not worried about the growth. The challenge is the desire to have everything consolidated in one place. When you say "MU each is a separate site" I'm not sure exactly what is shared in each - is it just a consolidated login to all the separate sites? So I'd need separate templates for each site as if each was a separate install with a sync of the user database of each site?

Many thanks - I'm going to install MU on a sample domain and see what we can do with it. Again, your constructive comments are much appreciated, including the help in pointing to plugins to get it done. WP is a much better CMS tool than it was years ago...

"I'm not sure exactly what is shared in each - is it just a consolidated login to all the separate sites?"

Nope, in MU every site shares the same database , the same themes the same plugins. *everything*. When you install and play around (which I was going to suggest) you'll see. :)

Nice - one last question... I just had a GREAT custom newspaper theme made for me. Works beautifully... but doesn't seem to appear at all in the themes list in WPMU. Now I'm finding out that the themes themselves aren't compatible? Is there a way to "convert" the wordpress regular theme and, if so, what are the primary differences and reasons why themes won't show up in WPMU?

Again... many thanks!

Works beautifully - the problem was 'Themes activation' and plugins in the mu directory. Wow... it looks awesome. Thank you!