I wonder whether anyone can share their strategies for managing multiple weblogs on a single install?

For my personal website, running on an earlier version of MT, I set up a main container blog plus several other content blogs, and used MTOtherBlog to pipe the content blogs into the container blog, which seems to require an extra rebuild or so to make the update stick. It sounds intricate...

Is it?

Is that a good way to do it or a clumsy way? How do you do yours?

For a site I'm building now, I'll want a similar thing... front page should not resemble a blog but will take content from at least one blog. Inside the site, some site sections will be MT-driven, though I'll want to make that as transparent as possible.

I'll want several HTML snippets, includes etc. to be available site-wide (too all sections)... where should they go?

Again, I've set up a container blog plus several others. Of course, with this being a new install, I don't have plugins installed yet...

So I'm just wondering what are the possible ways are to do all this stuff.

To reiterate... I'm talking about a single site built seamlessly using multiple weblogs here, rather than some multi-blog-portal-beast.

Other thoughts... is sub-blog functionality available or something I should want? Any other plugins that can help me.

Thanks

I use 7 blogs to manage the content of my web site. I found the need to rebuild across multiple blogs annoying, so I created a system of server-side includes to keep the content updated.

For each blog, I created a new index template to build the navigation you see on the left of my site. For example, for the blog "The Window," I have a template which has the link to the blog, the category archives, and the latest entry in the category "Photo of the Day." Any time I rebuild "The Window's" index, then this navigation template is automatically rebuilt.

Since the content this template creates is included in the site's main page (and all it's other pages for that matter), every time a browser calls the page, the updated information is always included without having to rebuild each blog's index pages.

There are other ways to do this using PHP that I'm sure someone else can offer advise.

jblayloc: nice.

So you've stripped all fancy formatting out of the content blogs and are just pulling them in using either an Apache SSI or a PHP include statement. I was using a similar method once upon a time, but changed.

I suppose this means I would, for each *section*, have to create pages that pull in the relevant content - and store those section pages in the primary blog?

I see you're using a Mac as well. I'm currently building the site locally on my Powerbook and found installation a breeze since OS X seems to just come with Apache loaded on! Any chance of php being built in so I test the php include method, or am I going to have to install that?

(Trying to get my head around the various options for hierarchies within hierarchies etc. - confusing)