I posted a question on limiting articles by user in the Joomla forum and it was suggested that I use a community extension to store unique user data. In my case the data I want to maintain for each user would ideally be a Joomla article. I realize the ES user profile is meant for more discreet data but thought I'd ask the question here to see what ideas you have.

Goal: A unique "User Article" will be created for every member that only they and the administrator can see. Any attempts to access the article via creative URL should be denied.

Alternatives:

1) One way would be to use the ACL mechanism whereby a group would be created for each user and that group would have only 1 member, that user. Then that user's unique Group and the Administrator Group would be applied to each "User Article" when it's created.

However, I understand there may be ACL Group limits that would make this method break-down? For example, admin area UI that can't load 100's or 1,000's of user group names.

2) Create an article category and make each user an author of this "Unique Articles" category. Then I could create an override for the article view and loop through at the top to bypass any articles in this "Unique Articles" category such that the user will only see articles for which they are the author.

Any better, simpler approaches or creative use of the ES profile?