Best practice for multiple blogs using wordpress

I am a novice at Wordpress but I am very familiar with PHP and programming.

I have a somewhat complex website that I would like to program in Wordpress. I have ~40 static pages, ~5 different blog pages, a home page that display some static text and lists the newest posts in each of the different blogs.

My question is what is best practice when it comes to setting up multiple blogs? Should I set up different authors and query by author? Should I set up one author and multiple categories or tags and then query by those categories/tags?

I would like things as simple as poss开发者_如何学编程ible. Right now on the dev site I have everything set up using categories. My worry is that the user might forget to select a category for his post (and then it would never show up).

If I switch to using multiple authors is there a way I can view all of the posts by one author? Similar to categories (/category/%categoryName%/).

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You could segment it by author, but the support for that isn't as robust as you'd probably need. I would suggest using WordPress Multisite:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network