Working With Web Portals

I am working on a new site for a large LAN party a group of us is putting on later this year. The event should host 500 people, so the site needs to work well. I was thinking about doing the whole thing from scratch, but that would take too much time and there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

I started by looking at PHP-Nuke. It has been around for a while and there are a fair number of modules and other add-ons available. However, many of the configuration options I was looking for cannot be found, or are often times not what I want. For example, you must use their three column layout, which is fine, but I can't seem to find how to move modules, like Survey, from one side to the other, or even change their order. And even if I set a module as inactive, it shows up anyway!

I'm now going to give Drupal a try, as I've heard good things about it. Hopefully it will be more flexible.

Overall, I basically need a site that allows for news posting, forums, and the ability to add in my own modules such as a seating chart and event registration. I have one, sort of, of my own over at Network of Gamers, but it's based on phpBB, which has its own set of problems. Namely that its really, really hard to integrate other functionality into it, the core code itself is a mess, and security is lacking. I'll surely be pulling code from NoG over to the new site, but a lot of work remains ahead.