Wordpress Multiple User Sites

Well WordPress Multisite lets you build a network of blogs. If you don't really need a network of blogs and only need a series of posts and pages then don't even bother messing with the Multisite stuff.

So in your case, assuming that you only need all those posts in pages on one site, you need permission controls to govern which users have access to which posts pages.

It's easy to resolve. WordPress has access control called Roles. By default there are 5 roles, one of which is the Author role.

Authors can publish content, edit content, delete content, upload files (images or whatever) -- access to content is limited to their own content, if I remember right, so one author can't mess with the content of another author.

What you need is a tool called Role Manager. Such a tool lets you manage permissions for roles, and even add new roles. You could use it to make a new role called "People" or whatever name you want, then only assign permissions that you think are appropriate - for example only give that role Edit Content permissions.

You'll need to experiment a bit to make sure the permission control you set up works as intended.

WPPro is correct about the basic WP roles, but the Role Manager plugin appears work only on older WP versions. Another plugin which functions in what sounds the same is Capability Manager, which I've used on several blogs with good results.

It allows very granular control of the capabilities of roles, and creation of custom roles as needed.

ReikiGirl mentioned creating pages as well as posts, and also mentioned the need to allow users to publish their content - all of this is easy with the Capability Manager plugin. Really not necessary to use multi-site for these needs.

If you have wordpress 3.0 or better you can turn it into a multi-user site just by changing a little code. I have used it for a few of my sites. This way you will be able to upgrade. It is my understanding that MU is cancelled now.

Thanks for all the replies and help, taking a look at capability manager. It's fairly self explanatory, but the plugin site, forum etc was down when I checked yesterday.

Tony