I'll be developing a site for a homeowners association with 150 condominiums. I'm debating whether to find a ready made open source script or if it would be better to have a script written from scratch. Here are the requirements: Main page: General information about the properties Contact page: Contact property manager, and others Photo gallery page: Property slideshow Maintenance page: Maintenance schedule (members only) Poll: the management want your opinion (members only) News page: Important news and information from management. Members notified by email. (members only) Board page: HOA board members presentation. View agendas and minutes uploaded by management (members only) Mini forum pages: let the members speak I think a script such as phpfox will be a huge overkill and it's more aimed at the social part than I care for. Maybe there is something out there a little lighter? I am currently looking at Joomla and Drupal, but am not yet familiar enough with any of them to decide The other option is to have it coded from scratch. I'm not sure how much coding time there would be involved and how expensive it would be. Any suggestions?
I personally prefer Joomla, you can find few paid extensions that will provide the functionality that you need. Drupal can also do that, but quite often extensions get discontinued, nor the future of Drupal development is clear.
I decided to go with WP. I have always used WP as blog only, but after looking through all the plugins it was obvious that it can do so much more, and easily will cover my needs for this project.
I would use Wordpress with Buddypress plugins. They are free to use and will be fairly easy to set up for a small community. There are lots of tutorials online to help you get started (its really not that complicated!). If you do have any problems then you can always pay a freelancer to help.