You won't have to dabble with a lot of PHP, but... you *will* have to configure it a lot in order to get exactly what you want (going through all the menu options, testing different layouts, etc).

No system is idiot-proof. Where I work we set up a PHP application to have people type their press releases (similar to what you're doing), and somebody called us claiming that the stuff entered was all deleted. After looking at the issue it turned out the person was pushing "no" everytime the browser asked for confirmation for submission!

I like postNuke over phpNuke because the skins of the former are easier to hack. There's even a couple of "simplified" skins with the bare minimum so that you can easily get the layout you want, without too much PHP knowledge. On the other hand, phpNuke seems to have more extensions ("modules") available. In both cases, you will have to spend time laying out the site and configuring it. It would be too confusing to a newbie if you leave the thing running out of the box (well, the tarball, or zipfile).

The downsides of php/postNuke is that none of them allow to easily upload images, at least to my knowledge. So if they want to have articles with an image on it, it could be an issue. Other than that, they could be a bit of overkill if you *only* need to post news.

I hope this helps... ask away if you have more specific questions.

Edit: by "configuring", I mean web-based configuration, assuming the server is already set up.





[download a life]