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CMS Recommendations for Static Site Migration?
a-singularity asks: "I'm a Ph.D. student (and GSoCer) who also works for a campus extension organization to extend and maintain their website. They inherited the site from another organization at another institution. Currently the site is updated by editing very ugly, table-clogged HTML when someone requests it. The site maintains no separation of concerns, and has several poorly designed PHP scripts for database access. There are many CMS solutions out there, and while I've used a few (Drupal, MovableType), I'm not familiar with many other options. What is the best CMS out there for simple management of a medium-sized site with regular updates? What about ease of use, so all of those who might need to can submit updates?"
A JSR-168 compatible portal might be a good solution. It would take care of things like single sign on, and they usually have a fair number of useful modules. You should be able to find some forum and wiki modules, among others.
These things take some substantial work to configure and set up, but once set up, they tend to work very well. You could look at Jetspeed or JBoss, for starters.
These modules are also (slowly) starting to become comodities, so you should be able to get lots of useful functionality stuffed in there without having to write too much code. The various departments and such can each write their own little portlet, and get it all integrated into the whole.
These things tend to be more for dynamic sites, but I could see one working pretty well even for a static site. They often have lots of content management features, etc... Usually they are DB backed, but a good postgres install shouldn't be too hard to come by.