WordPress MU or single ?

It sounds like regular WP will serve your purposes.

However, what are the issues you’ve had with creating individual user pages?

Does each author have permission to publish their own posts or do they first get approved by an editor?

Can you trust that authors will cooperate and not try to post to places they are not supposed to, or is it necessary that restrictions be enforced by WordPress on who can post where?

Hi

yes to what you said. The way I do that, instead of using category pages, is create a WordPress static page for each author and give those page appropriate titles. The site Nav is created from the pages, so now the pages are on the nav and you are half way there.

Then you have to correlate a category to those pages. I use a WordPress function called query_posts to change the default query that is normally run on a page, which would display the content of that one page. The WordPress template for pages is page.php, found in the theme folder. I put an if statement like what is below just before the WordPress loop. You have the book there so I won’t explain what the loop is. Just put this code before the starting IF of the loop.

I am using made up category ID#’s in my example. Where I show $cat = 5 you must find the actual category ID of the category on your installation. Below the code, I’ve pasted in a link to an article on how to do that.

<?php
$cat = 0;
if (is_page('phil')) {
   $cat = 5;
} elseif (is_page('bill')) {
   $cat = 9;
} elseif (is_page('jill')) {
   $cat = 12;
}
if ($cat > 0) {
  $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
  query_posts("cat=$cat&paged=$paged");
} 

// WordPress loop starts here
?>

That code creates the proper paging for categories with more than one page of posts, and assigns the category for a specific author to their page. For pages that are not author-post pages, the page template functions in its default way.

http://www.wplancer.com/how-to-find-a-wordpress-category-id/
article screenshot is of an older version of WP but it still works the same way