How would you build an employee list private site?

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Hi There,

Just hoping for your thoughts on the most efficient way to make a micro site with restricted access to list 400 or so employees in a searchable list, each with Name, Title, Department and image.

I imagined setting up custom attributes and adding a page per user and making a custom page list template search results template that didnt actually link through to the user page but provided lists.

Problems
- BULK ADDING PAGES WITH METADATA AND IMAGES
how to easily add 400+ users from a csv file or similar without manually inputting each page. nest solution I have is the add multiple pages, but I would still need to input all images. The Hissy csv to cif format tool is broken in c5.7.4

RESTRICT ACCESS BUT MAKE LOGGING IN EASY
- how to restrict access only to empoyees. 1 login password per user? That means 400 user profiles. Or I create one generic user password. I could do a cPanel password but it is ugly. I need a clean elegant access solution to restrict access but make the user experience super slick without having to sign up.

MAKE SEARCHES FILTERABLE
- If I want to add my employees each to categories, e.g. department, I am concerned if I go the route of filing them under parent pages because the page lists at a super parent level do not sort tidily (a problem I am trying to fix elsewhere). Is tags now the best / easiest way to create these custom fields and make pages both searchable by and filtering a page list by it. I normally user attributes, but I haven't ever used the Tags feature. Would it be appropriate here?

I just don't want to start a build having not used the existing features in the most appropriate way.

Ultimately I really want to build in c5.7 as I gave up Joomla long ago but I have have never run it for data of this scale, only ever really smaller "normal" site and a few of the tools I was hoping I might find dont exist in 5.7

Then again maybe I should go back to 5.6 for this build? Just thinking that may be much better equipped with addons.

Any advice on what you would do would be much appreciated.