So here's my situation:

What I want to do is take a group of individuals (friends), and have a blog/website where we all contribute to certain areas of things. I.E. One person does news, one does movies, another music.

In the past I've used LiveJournal (definitely individual orientated) and Blogger (had a group experience here, it was too rigid).

Things I'm looking for in it are:
The ability to control the HTML/PHP/SQL elements of the page.
Multiple User access, with varying levels of controls
Ideally I'd like to not have to pay, but payment could be an option for an appropriate solution.

Recently I've been looking at Wordpress, but I'm not sure about it, especially after reading the WordpressMU site.

Any suggestions on what the best solution would be?

Just use Wordpress? It can have multiple users which can have different levels of control and rights.

Another alternative you could try out is a content management system (CMS). A site made with something like Drupal or Joomla etc can allow multiple editors setup multiple items, post, review, and manage content.

Lots of choices out there. Just shop around and see what works best for your team.

So, I guess my only question is how do I edit wordpress? Since Wordpress.org (php/sql) says I'm going to need web hosting. Also, is it worth paying for the CSS then?

If it's just going to be used by your team, then I would throw it on a PIII box (or something you have lying around) & just run it in house. No need for hosting if it isn't going to be accessed by external IPs.

Another option in this realm is Website Baker. I used this system recently when looking for an EXTREMELY user-friendly CMS for a local fire department. It worked quite well - very simple setup, pretty little interface and very easy for non-techie's to work with.

Wordpress would be your best bet for what you want to do, however if you wanted to throw in more material you could always move everything into a website

I had used a good open source solution called Textpattern. I was in the same situation as you, except instead of different parts of media, we used different topics. Just to give you an example our blog site was aimed at the exact thing a regular newspaper was aimed at - multiple editors, multiple journalists, and overall just multiple contributors.

Textpattern has very well thought out permission based settings. I would say Wordpress is much like a one user computer as where Textpattern is like a Linux server. It allows a better control of design as you can pull up code from the admin panel (CSS, conf files, etc.).

The parent site textpattern.com is where you can consume more information on it. There is also a sibling site textpattern.org where most of the community action happens (plug ins, themes, etc.).

G

Hey, thanks for all the input guys.

Unfortunately, a few of my contributors have proven to be less than dependable. Nevertheless, I have decided to press on with the project anyways! (Since I've wanted to do this for some time, and as long as I have the drive I might as well )

For the interim period I've decided that Wordpress is indeed the best solution (at least until the contributors are established more consistantly). Assuming we can start generating a reasonable number of hits, I've decided that I'd like to purchase the web hosting anyways, if for no other reason than I think it'll be a great learning experience.

Additionally, I'm thinking of trying to establish some sort of message boards to attach in order to create a more community centric feel. I've heard phpbb is good for this, can anyone tell me more?

I know Wordpress automatically pings, but is there any other good way to draw in readers? (I'm not exactly thrilled that my facebook,aim, and signature at several sites have become billboards, but if it worked better, I wouldn't feel quite as bad)

Thanks again

PHPBB is a good forum system, I've used it and been happy with it in the past. I've heard good things about SMF as well but haven't used it in a production environment.

Other things for promotion, grab the SEO pack plugin for WordPress and the XML sitemap plugin, both should help optimize the site for search engines.