I'm at a bit of an impasse trying to satisfy this client's requirements. Long story short, they would like an overall site that certain people can access and modify, plus a blog with a completely different look and feel. Their current site was just redesigned, and it is what I'll be primarily porting to WordPress. They also have a WordPress blog sitting at /blog running an outdated WP with a Kubrick-based theme - they would like to keep that theme/styling.
Here's the issues:
- They want to manage it all from a single backend
- They want the blog with the different look and feel to reside on /blog for the links that are already out there (multisite won't allow this).
- The blog pages should all be consistent - categories, single posts, archives, etc
- Search should return results from both site and blog
So basically, I'm wondering if this is feasible from a single install with conditional statements and theming, or if a multisite is necessary (and all the hassles that come with it). Normally I would just go multisite because of the separate theming, but since the blog that has the separate theme needs to sit on /blog, that won't work (easily).
Any ideas?