I suggest you use EPiServer for storing the user generated articles as well. It's very common to have simplified edit functions for users who don't have access to edit mode and to create the pages in code-behind.

For moderating/approval you also have excellent functions for EPiServer pages because you don't have to publish them. You can have publish access rights for moderators/editors only. Then connect an approval workflow to automate this process and simplify for the moderators.

If you want to you can build the moderating functions into the pagetypes, and display them only if the logged in user has publish access rights for example. That way you can have moderators browsing the site and they can edit/remove/unpublish content etc. very easily.

The possibilities are endless. The only reasons I can see to store the pages in a separate database or table is if you use another product (like EPiServer Community, which by the sounds of it, would probably be a good feature for your site), or if you use the data from another application with specific needs. For examle if you need to do queries in the database and these queries require some article data to be in their own columns (i.e. not using properties to store the data).

Alright, that's very helpful, thx a lot! here are a few follow up questions, hope u still got the patience to answer (:

1. The user group part: right now, we have Episerver Admin, Editor,  Site Admin, Site registered users. can we use the episerver user management to handle all of this? I thought it mostly handles episerver admin/editor, not really the site admin or registered users.
2. we do need to make a seperate interface for the registered user and site admins right? since they dont login to the episerver mode.
3. since the content is no longer put by episerver editor, when a page is created, there won't be any property field to put in contents right? and the contents will be fetched by for example user controls? this currently confuses me the most, how does it work actually? before a page is created out of a page type which contains 'title' 'intro' 'image' or whatever properties, and the page has its fixed look, now the users will create the content and the page can look really different. dont know how to put my question, but what is the correct way to build this? Do I actually use properties to store all the content?

Thank you!!

You can create whatever groups you like. Then, when users register at your site, you can add them to any groups you like. Then you can set access rights in the page tree any way you like. So it's simply very flexible :) When rendering content and working in code-behind you can also choose to apply access rights or not, depending on what you need to do.

Yes, you probably have to create your own forms for letting the users input the content which will be on the pages. You can however, use the Property webcontrols to let the user input data by setting the EditMode aspnet property to true (not the whole story, but it should get you started, also search the forums for more info on this).

When you create a page, even if you do it programmatically, you always set the page type first. This defines what properties will be available for you to fill. Then you can fill them with data from anywhre, for example from a textbox which you let the user fill (be sure to consider injection attacks etc.) Refer to this blog post for an example.