Re:Just talking with my wife about this subject (Score 1)

If I may plug a project - www.openacs.org It's somewhere half in between the 'php/mysql' solution and the full-blown, commercially supported shrinkwrapped package. Very active community, quite a few companies that will build-to-order for you based upon it (if commercial offering & support is an issue for you) and with many (large) organisations depending on it, it won't go away very soon. Only drawback - it takes a learning curve, it's a mature toolkit and you really need to spend some time with the (plentiful) documentation.