I'm from AL too, the Mobile/Fairhope area. I was born there, lived 20+ years there, and have been back often. And I think you're mostly wrong. For varying lengths of time, I've also lived in NJ, MA, and VA (my current home).

1. The public schools in AL are still extremely segregated (by income and race), and the vast majority have abysmal standards. (Besides attending the schools growing up, I also worked for a company supplying software to schools, and my wife taught at some of the lowest-income schools. I speak from experience in this front.) The public education system is among the worst is the nation.

2. The people in AL are not all racists, and those jokes do get old. However, I knew many, many racists in AL. Is the racism in AL worse than any other mostly rural part of the country? Probably not, but we do have a long history of racism and hate to overcome. So, I personally don't get offended by that stereotype.

3. The people in AL are not among the most open-minded and accepting people. You're just wrong about that. Try being homosexual, politically liberal, or non-Christian in Alabama. Try answering, "Actually, I'm an agnostic/atheist" when somebody asks you which church you attend. You'll quickly see just how hateful and hypocritical many Alabamians are. Is this bigotry worse than any other rural part of the country? Yes, from my experience, it is.

Some of the most loving, accepting, and brilliantly intelligent people I've ever known are from Alabama. And the AL river delta has an unbelievable diversity of wildlife and variety of outdoor activities. From the foothills in the north to the Gulf beaches in the south, Alabama is a beautiful state. However, the people of the state are generally inadequately educated and dogmatically Christian.

So yeah, the stereotype of the barefoot, illiterate Alabamian is just that: an exaggerated archetype. But every culture/region has its stereotype. Guess what, not everybody from NJ is a fu##ing douchebag....just most of them. I keed, I keed. Seriously, don't be so defensive; change the stereotype by being a great person. And when somebody says, "Wow, you're from Alabama? You don't seem like it," respond, "Yeah, Alabama is still playing catch-up, but it has actually come a long way since the '60s."

After getting tired of messing with postnuke, I moved our family site to xaraya -- allegedly a much cleaner and more flexible CMS. Yes, it was more flexible, but the learning curve was very steep. In addition, even though there is lots of documentation, the basic stuff that I wanted was rarely there.

So, I did a little checking and very little hacking, and moved the site to Wordpress. I have not regretted the move since. Even though it is first and foremost a blogging tool, it has plugins for pictures (gallery2, coppermine, etc), user restrictions, user levels. In addition the templates are simple enough that it shouldn't be hard to integrate other tools into your site at least visually.

The other plus about Wordpress is that the community is extremely active. There are always new plugins and themes being developed. And if you have a question, the answer is usually in the forums in a matter of hours (that is if it hasn't been answered before)