I use nginx as my main HTTP server.  I want the users to be able to publish their own pages in a special directory (public_html) within their home directory. They should also be able to use PHP scripts if they want to. You can access the user webpage (that is the content of their public_html directory) with this URL: http://[server]/~[user]/. Here is a snippet of the configuration I use to do so:

index index.html index.xml index.php;

# PHP in home directory
location ~ ^/~(.+?)(/.*\.php)(.*)$ {
  alias /home/$1/public_html;

  try_files $2 =404;
  fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
  fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
  fastcgi_index index.php;
  fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
  include fastcgi_params;

  fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /~$1$fastcgi_script_name;
}

# Home directories
location ~ ^/~(.+?)(/.*)?$ {
  alias /home/$1/public_html$2;
}

You can see here the two locations that match the user directories. The first one matches the PHP scripts and passes them to the FastCGI process manager. For more information, see PHPFcgiExample. Note that I use a UNIX instead of an INET socket. Why would you bother IP on localhost when you can use an UNIX socket? I also set the SCRIPT_NAME parameter to ensure that it is derived correctly from the user URL. This need to be fixed for pages that point to themselves. I also had to restart php5-fpm to ensure that the changes were taken into account.