Hello, I need to build a site that will consist of news, mostly related to articles with some attached file(s). Users should be allowed to post new articles and files, which after being approved, should be publicly available. When submitting, the article may go to one or more categories. Other features I'd like is providing alerting to users when new content of their interest is added, etc. Other addons that would be nice are "most popular articles", etc. From what I tried, phpnuke seems to do most of this, but the only problem I found was that when submitting, it doesn't accept local files to be added, just files specified by http:// links. Is there any fix or addon for this? Or what other (lightweight if possible) option should I try? Thanks in advance.
You could also take a look at drupal. I just did a multisite subdomain/domain install of Drupal and it works beautifully. Worth a shot if you're interested.
vBulletin can also do this. Take a look => http://www.newsback.com I say vBulletin coz it was not specified if open source or commercial
What you're describing is a 'workflow' system. PostNuke has a nice module called "pagesetter" that allows you to setup the exact features you're describing (http://www.elfisk.dk/). The module is very flexible, allowing you to define the specific fields you'd like in your 'publication type'. (Pagesetter is a page creation module allowing PostNuke administrators to create their own publication types containing any set of relevant data fields.) Note, you can also create fields to upload files and attach images. If you have any questions let me know.
I think DATALIFE ENGINE is best for Content Managment. It is reliable and its look and feel is too good...
If you can code, choose Wordpress. Why? Because it's just the best. Creating plugins are fun, platform is mean and powerfull plus it's secure and in my opion, it has the best default SEO.
WordPress : You can configure it to allow contributor registrations and you just need to approve submissions.