Help with community web portal project

[sound]

Hi,
looking for Help with a community web portal project
Does anyone have any experience using a off the shelf software solution to build a community web portal?
Would like to be able to include some of the following features
Weblog
News articles that can be published by individuals
Polls
Galleries
Forum.
many thanks
Simon

[andy_jacko]

phpnuke??, thats the best of heard of, but never used it

[matbennett]

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.

[accelerator]

What's your level of coding experience?

If you don't have that much experience, then you could make use of some free services such as http://www.blogger.com for the blog, which I also believe has an additional service for adding photos.

For the forum, I think http://www.phpbb.com is an excellent free product. It's not too difficult to install if you use a web host geared up to it (pm me if you want a recommendation), although you will have to keep it regularly updated.

Depending how many people need to update the site, Macromedia Contribute 3 is a really excellent product for allowing users to update an html site you have created, but may prove expensive.

If you're feeling adventurous there are now a whole load of free content management systems. As well as phpnuke, there's dot net nuke, mambo and more, but these need a fair bit of experience.

I would give serious consideration to starting the site quickly with blogger / phpbb, then you can develop more sophisticated solutions as you see necessary.

Rgds

accelerator