Need to build a news article based site - any open source solution I can tweak?

Question

Hi guys - I have a freelance project where I have to build a news articles based website. Let me go over it a bit. The site is such that you have a super admin and you have writers - writers join the website by sending in an application along with a sample of their writing skills - if approved the admin approves them and an account is created for the writer. Aside form writers anyone can join the website - upon joining members get a free blog and can post comments on articles and other users blogs.

The writers as stated earlier can post actual articles which are categorised. The categories however are quite.. well.. deep ended you have Main sections - then you have categories within the main section - then you have sub categories and then.. further sub categories...and then articles. Don't ask me why because well thats the clients requirement and he won't budge from it.

Aside that the website would have a page where you see all blog posts by all users. All users would have a profile page. Also down the line the client would like to add in a forums section where all members can host discussions. He would also like to add in an online store where he could sell certain articles via paypal or so..

I can build this thing myself from scracth using Php mysql and a bunch of classes I've developed over time but I'm interested in looking to use a third party open source option for this which pretty much handles all the work. Keeping all the requirements stated in mind - what could be used to build something of this nature. I've seen the following news websites: www.gulfnews.com and www.thenational.ae - I assume they're both built on some similar open source platform...

What would be a good extensible CMS or open source package that could meet all the requirements stated above...wordpress, drupal? I'm open to suggestions - it has to be Php MySQL based as thats my tool of choice..

EDIT============

Basically I have no experience with Drupal at all so I'm completely new to using it. Would the end result be an independant website or would it be intertwined with drupal such that I'd have to have drupal set up on the clients end for it to be able to work? Sorry if my question sounds lame :(

Answer 1

Drupal should fit your needs nearly out of the box.

Answer 2

I'd recommend drupal: http://drupal.org/

You can create a writer role for your writers. The taxonomy module will take care of your categorization needs. The blog module will provide individual blogs for all or selected users and provide a page to display all blog entries, as well as pages that only display specific blogs. You can use CCK if you need more to your articles than is provided by the built-in page or story content types, and views if you need to tweak the output. All users have a profile by default, and you can easily add to it with the profile module.

You can do all of this without any coding whatsoever.

Later on, you can easily add a forum, paypal integration, almost ANYTHING ELSE using only contributed modules.

Checkout http://www.drupalsites.net/ to see lots of sites built with drupal.

Answer 3

You can argue Wordpress is not a CMS, but Wordpress MU offers everything you need, except the forum and store, but there are good plugins for that.

Wordpress MU has extensive support for user roles and nested categories. Th MU part means that you can have one install for multiple blogs, and a central part. http://Wordpress.com is ran using Wordpress MU.