Database Driven School Newspaper - Not Sure if Appropriate Script Exists Already

[bchrhs]

Hallo,

First off, this is an awesome forum and I'm looking forward to being a part of it. I am just learning PHP but have a lot of experience with the code through my vBulletin Modding history =) My job for my school website class is to create a new website for our school newspaper that is database driven. It would take a very long time to create a series of scripts and the coding experience needed is probably beyond my current level.

Thus, I am wondering if anyone knows of a free program/script that will let me do the following things:

1. Make the frontend look similar to our current school newspaper website (http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/churchillhs/churchill_observer/)
2. Have a front page that gives brief overviews of new articles
3. A form for authors to enter in their section (sports, news, opinions, etc), author name, and the article.
4. A page for each section so viewers can look at past articles.
5. Accounts for different authors

It's pretty simple. There are tons of scripts out there and I dont know the one that would best fit my need. Any help is greatly appreciated for I am sure there is no need for me to create a brand new script.

[Elizabeth]

I would recommend a Content Management System (CMS) like Xoops, Exponent or phpWebsite-- there are a ton of others such as drupal, mambo, and joomla, as well. If you want to take a "test drive" of what's out there, you can go to http://opensourcecms.com/ and try each one out before you install.

[LoganK]

First of all, is this for college, middle school, high school, etc.?

In any case, when I was working back at a small-town newspaper, I did some market research and found out that many newspaper sites use open-source CMS's like Xoops and then customize them to look like a paper. One example I vividly remember is The Lowell Online (http://www.thelowell.org/) - they're a high school newspaper using a open-source CMS (Mambo) and it looks very professional and almost custom-coded. You may want to check them out as an example/reference.