I need help choosing a CMS

Your advice appreciated

[brizad]

A couple of aquaintneces of mine (and their investors) are aiming to take on the old, established-for-100-years town newspaper. They were planning on doing a regular print newspaper but I casually suggested that they should have an online version too, so now they'd like me to set it up and run it.

I can build sites and blogs, and do basic webmastering things, but I've never used or set-up a real CMS (other than wordpress blogs). I was looking at Mambo and Drupal first, but then I came accross Typo3 which seems to have a lot more functions although it seems less user friendly and has less good documentation than the other two.

I'm also wondering if maybe a full-blown CMS is more than I really need and that a 3 colums wordpress blog would be just fine. But I have to think about future needs and scaling too.

Here's what they'd like to have on the site to start:

- 3 column layout with the ability to place ads easily
- RSS feeds aggregated for content
- RSS feeds to publish for our readers
- Polls and surveys
- The ability for readers to comment on stories
- A community forum

possibly in the future:

- classified ads

I'd appreciate any thoughts on the best approach for setting this up.

Thanks

[freewebsiteideas]

I'd use wordpress along with phpbb or smf for the forum. Both of these forums scripts are free. And, then maybe Noah's for the classified ads.

[knowledgepower]

I use Drupal for a few sites. I like that there is an active and ongoing development effort for it. Unfortunatly, it can be quirky in that you may notice something isn't working only to find a recent post from the dev. team that it was broken by accident and here are the lines to fix until the next build.

It is pretty scalable, though--The Onion manages to use is.

[brizad]

I was looking at drupal and though it looked OK. I started getting confused by the page aliases though.

I like that it has an active community. How often do they break things though? That's a little scary. Is that for the stable release or for a beta?

[cerebrum]

try bricolage.cc

[brizad]

I've been leaning towards Joomla. It's an offshoot of mambo. Actually the website says that this is the development team that developed mambo. Apparently they all quit the mambo project to make this.

It's the best I've seen so far all things considered--features, support, community, price, and ease of use.

[wildbest]

Visit http:// open source cms .com and try out the demos of all well established open source CMS's.