One of my out of work projects is running a community portal for my local area. Tried PHP nuke a few years back and hated it. Slowly been building it up with home-grown scripts since then and the whole thing works a lot better : Faster, less buggy, better
SEO etc.
(now probably should just get some of you guys to look at it to tell me how to make some money from it!!).
PM me if you would like the URL to take a look. It isn't perfect by a long way but there could be some things worth cribbing from it.