>I need to set up a web site that has both public and member-only areas, a
>calendar of events, possibly a mailing list.  Anybody know of a good guide
>or even a module/script package for this kind of thing?

Well, there's always http://www.phpslash.org/

I personally like http://www.moveabletype.org/

Here are some screenshots: 

http://www.moveabletype.org/screenshots/screen-mainmenu.html

It's oriented toward blogging, but if you kept the entries to general
news, it is a nice lightweight slash-like interface with all the options 
you need. It is written in Perl.

I also installed http://www.phpnuke.org/ (pre-'postnuke.org') and 
found it to be "too heavy" for my purposes. Discovered Moveable Type 
as I kept noticing several attractive pages around were linked back to 
that site.

Freshmeat shows close to a hundred portals.

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=portal&section=projects

-jds