Hi
Thank you for this info.
What I ended using, with a colleagues help figuring it out, is to create custom templates for each author, then create a page for each author and link the page to the authors template. Set each author page as a child of the 'Authors' page.
When I set up a user I make sure the nickname is setup as the slug
Then in the blog I reference:
<a href="authors/<?php the_author_nickname() ?>/"><?php the_author() ?></a>
This then takes me to the correct author page.
Then to list the site authors, I can reference the child of authors:
<h2>Authors</h2>
<ul class="nomargins"><?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of=3'); ?></ul>
and it gives me a list of authors for the sidebar.
There seems like there should be an easier way to add more custom info to an author page but this solution does give me the freedom to put different info on each author page. So some authors who are more into using the web so use twitter and facebook and flickr etc can share this stuff but then the ones who don't use it don't have to share it. Also if one wants to share their youtube vids, they can and the others don't have to.
If anyone does come up with a different solution to do the same thing I would love to know about it.
Thank you again