It might be cumbersome, but have a form for users to create a Manager account (aka a Blog account). Then restrict them to only what they need to see. Have "tags" set up to create the headings/date/etc., and use Ditto to "sort" the blog posts by whatever tags/dates you want, and use Jot to make the comments.It may be more efficient to simply create the blogs and use newspublisher or FDM to restrict who can publish or post by limiting it to a specific group and allow editing in the front-end. For this you would need a document group (or user group, not sure about the different groups yet) for each user. Which will bring me back to the question I have asked in other posts of automatically creating the needed group at registration. New user equals new group.
It may be more efficient to simply create the blogs and use newspublisher or FDM to restrict who can publish or post by limiting it to a specific group and allow editing in the front-end. For this you would need a document group (or user group, not sure about the different groups yet) for each user. Which will bring me back to the question I have asked in other posts of automatically creating the needed group at registration. New user equals new group.
Front End Document Manager
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,14977.15.html
If you can create the unique user on registration this could be a cool feature.

EDIT: I just thought of something --- doing it the FDM way creates an issue where comments can’t be done on a specific blog post, because of how it’s done, all of the posts will be on one big page. Since user commenting is something I need, I might need to use Ditto/etc. to do this...Not sure about this. I think that you can use FDM to create new pages for each post and in the template you add the Jot call so that it is available for all posts. I have not done this yet, but I think that this should work. In the demo site they use NewsPublisher in this same way.
EDIT: I just thought of something --- doing it the FDM way creates an issue where comments can’t be done on a specific blog post, because of how it’s done, all of the posts will be on one big page. Since user commenting is something I need, I might need to use Ditto/etc. to do this...Not sure about this. I think that you can use FDM to create new pages for each post and in the template you add the Jot call so that it is available for all posts. I have not done this yet, but I think that this should work. In the demo site they use NewsPublisher in this same way.