Advice on front-end member sign-up and contributor forms

I have a writing website and I’d like to allow potential contributors to submit posts for approval. However, the post is actually an ‘article’, which is a custom taxonomy created by the IssueM plugin. The plugin ‘User Role Editor’ handles this backend quite nicely, but I’d prefer to have a front-end solution. I’ve been looking at possible plugins like these but none appear to be powerful enough.

The potential contributor needs to fill out a font-end submission form to become a contributor. It needs to include a number of custom fields (using ACF plugin, perhaps) about him/herself first. Only when they have filled in the form do they become a ‘contributor’ and are given access to the post (article) edit page.

In short I need a member sign up form that supports custom fields and allows me to display those custom fields in a custom user profile page. I then need something else that allows them simple post (article) editing rights. It would be nice to be able to switch on and off the various post edit options (sidebar, post type etc), which you can do in ‘User Role Editor’ plugin.

I’ve dloaded WordPress Front-End Editor to play with but a) there’s no documentation and b) it doesn’t appear to be working on networked WP.

Anyone any experience with this kind of work flow? Any combination of plugins that will handle all this for me nicely? I’m happy to pay for a premium plugin if necessary.

I’m ok with getting under the bonnet and tinkering with php and know CSS well but the whole user role admin stuff is new to me.