My project is to find out if we can use an open source CMS to make an new website without distinction between the "web newspapers" for each festival and the information about the organization which arranges the festival. For each festival one needs to be able to connect articles, interviews, images, video, and sound files to each participating stage artist group, and be able to show any of these articles anywhere on the whole UKM site. A search function for this needs to be available.
We probably need one portal per local municipality, one for each regional municipality, and one for the national level. Since little content will be written/photographed at the local level, the local portals will be mostly for showing stuff like registration deadlines, contact information, and event date/time/place information. All of this should be dynamically generated from an external MSSQL database (which already exists - its structure cannot be changed). But since some local festivals happen to have participants who want to publish content on the web, the function described in the first paragraph should be available here as well.
For the domain host, a list of all the portals with the option to show or hide them should be available.
There are other functionality requirements as well, but this should give you an idea of what we need to accomplish. Having only a few weeks left before I start on a new job, this is a pre-project to help me make a recommendation to my boss before I leave. I chose dotnetnuke based mostly on face value and the fact that it uses ASP.net. I am completely new to ASP.net and the Visual Studio IDE, but as I want to learn it and my boss is fed up with messy PHP, I go for .net..
What I need is a CMS which makes layout management easy, and has good functions for creating articles and juggling them around. This loads off a lot of work, and I can focus on the organization specific demands. I do not know how much can be accomplished by writing new modules, but I hope I don't have to mess about with the core too much.
First question: Is there no way for me to edit posts in here? That would have helped me keep my thread much more tidy... I could add and revise info for example in this important post once people said they didn't understand something.