I am looking for some advice on what blogging program might be best for my website. I used to use Movable Type, but now that the free version limits a user to one author, I need to move to a different software.

Here is what I want to do.

I want to have various authors posting to their own individual blogs all of which will be related to a central theme which in this case is Arts and Culture. I do not need an automatic feature to allow people to sign up for blogs as I want to keep the number of authors relatively small and want control over who my bloggers are. I also plan on maintain a number of static and non-blogged php pages on my site under the main directory.

Ideally, I would like a program that allows me to choose the directory where each blog will be placed as some of my authors will be using their own subdomains to host non-blog pages or frontpages, but this is not a necessity. I am familiar with Wordpress and I could use Wordpress MU to create a series of blogs in directories under a single subdomain that I have set up. Unfortunately I cannot seem to get Wordpress MU set up to even create blogs in directories (I understand that using the subdomain feature on this program can be problematic on shared webhosting.).

I have been reading about Serendipity and about b2evolution but am unfamiliar with those programs and cannot seem to find information on how easy/difficult it is to customize their templates.

Does anybody have any suggestions or advice as to what has worked best for them?

Could I set up various versions of Wordpress in seperate subdomains on a single account? Could I have one version setup in sd1.mydomain.com and another in sd2.mydomain.com for example?

Thanks, I will look into doing something like that then.