yet another multi texture topic

I would like to apply multiple textures on a mesh. Up till now i used the vertex alpha to do that, but it only allows blendig between 2 textures. According to those 2 topics, more than 2 textures could be applied by using alpha images, but that would increase the number of texture files quite a lot.
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2addons/view ... ture+blend
http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Materials

Is there a way to use vertex colour instead of vertex alpha to blend textures?
http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/4184/vcolnz6.jpg
Id like to use different textures for the red/green/blue/black/white areas.

Use a fragment shader, and sample the specific texture unit based on the color components of the pixel/vertex